Holy Cats! This Broadway adaptation terrible!

Francesca Hayward and Robbie Fairchild in Cats. Image courtesy Universal Pictures.

Reason and sanity are not things to be found in Cats. Rather, the loopy, unfortunately and mildly enchanting Broadway adaptation is all things and no things at once. Somehow, despite a brilliant lack of cohesion or basic plot logic, this film drew a bunch of famous folks – Idris Elba! Taylor Swift! Judi Dench! Jason Derulo! – to lend an air of respectability to the lunacy. Perhaps I'm missing something indelible about a show that ran for many, many years on Broadway. Or maybe the film adaptation is the fever dream of ego-driven idiots.

 

I think Cats is about a talent show in which the winner is reincarnated or something along those lines. Aside from the stars mentioned above are Jennifer Hudson, Ray Winstone, Ian McKellen, Rebel Wilson, and James Corden. Ballerina Francesca Hayward serves as the audience surrogate exploring what tries to be a mystical world of feline majesty. Everyone is dressed like a cat, they have weird cat names and do quasi cat things that are far sillier than ever intended. There are many songs tossed in because this is a musical, including a song Swift sings that is well outside her capabilities. Then everything ends on a rather banal shot meant to mean something important to director Tom Hooper and Andrew Lloyd Webber.

Cats is an audacious calamity, wrong on almost every front and on nearly every level. Sometimes the film is bizarre and accidentally enchanting, littered with impeccable scenery devouring by Elba, McKellen, and Wilson. It tries to hit so many tones and have so many layers it misses all of them, dashing through emotions at unimaginable speeds and with no control. Cats is madness with a $90 million budget and a director with no clue what to do with it, the perfect recipe for an expensive cluster best viewed on hallucinogens.

With two hours of screen time to fill though Cats can't keep the insanity rolling. It's in those moments where the film's legitimate incompetence comes to light, bringing the terrible fun to a frustrating halt. Like the CGI, which looks dreadful and incomplete, as if they gave up about three quarters of the way in. Hooper fails wildly staging the musical numbers, most notably in the two renditions of Memory. This is the showcase song, and the film has the very experienced Hudson on hand to sing it. This should be the easiest win for this film, but it ends up completely mucking the whole thing up. The emotions wrought from the song land with a thud, due to a mix of Hooper failing to establish the right tone, strange choreography choices in the second version, and general framing and editing flaws that fail to convey the song's melancholy. Hudson is game and tries her best, but it's hard to succeed when everything around you is en fuego as it is in Cats.

If any one thing kept this film going though, it was the audience at the screening I attended. I've never sat with an audience as splendidly sincere and sarcastic as the one who soldiered through Cats with me. Every little cat pun or dumb, awkward cat movement garnered a wicked groan or one of those “I cannot believe this is happening” laughs. Some folks applauded after a few of the musical numbers – Memory was not one of them – because somehow applause is the only acceptable way to appreciate insanity, even if no one behind it is around to hear it. It was a hoot to watch it with folks, a shared experience that will be difficult to replicate in the future. Too bad this five-star audience had to sit through a one-star film. 

Review: One out of Five Stars  

Click here to see the trailer. 

Rating: PG

Run time: 110 minutes

Genre: Musical 

tl;dr  

What Worked: Audience 

What Fell Short: Everything Else 

What To Watch Instead: Singing in the Rain, Umbrellas of Cherbourg

The Secret Life of Pets is surprisingly mundane

Gidget, voiced by Jenny Slate, is pictured in a scene from The Secret Life of Pets. Image courtesy Universal Pictures.

The Secret Life of Pets marks the sixth film animation studio Illumination has spawned and it follows in the footstep of at least four of those (excluding the miserable Hop.) Like its predecessors, The Secret Life of Pets is a serviceable enough film with a few flashing moments of intrigue overwhelmed by mediocrity and profit hawking. It's the kind of film that references the studio's most popular franchise, Despicable Me, twice in less than an hour and a half. That followed a short film preceding the feature itself starring the company's breakout characters, the Minions.

Illumination knows exactly where it's bread is buttered and how to appeal to a wide consumer base. Making a movie with any true artistic statement, however, seems to be a little outside of its wheelhouse.

There's nothing overly wrong with The Secret Life of Pets. It's a cute enough idea with a few moments that capture the premise's adorableness aptly – most notably an end sequence set to Bill Withers' wonderful Lovely Day – and nice voice work from Jenny Slate, Lake Bell, Dana Carvey and a few glorious seconds of a menacing Al Brooks. Some of the jokes land well enough, most notably when the writers get a little macabre with their humor. It's a well designed film, in as much as the design is to appease kids without actually challenging them in any meaningful way.

Disney, Pixar and even (sometimes) DreamWorks have offered fair directed at children that has more depth, nuance and aesthetic pleasures than anything Illumination has cobbled together. And despite the animated format and the main appeal to a youth audience, viewers can and should expect better than the less than stellar tricks the film uses to tell its story. The Secret Life of Pets takes the proverbial easy way out from the very first frame that shows exterior photos of famous New York City landmarks set to Taylor Swift's Welcome to New York. A vehicular chase scene involving Brooklyn is scored to the Beastie Boys' No Sleep Till Brooklyn, whilst a fantasy sequence about friendship is coupled with Queen's You're My Best Friend. It's as if the multitude of filmmakers – the movie has two directors and three writers credited – are afraid of relying on audience a modicum of audience intuition.

Illumination is a fearful studio, happy to offend in trivial, kid friendly ways (this film has a fair amount of jokes about pooping and peeing) but not in a fashion that is daring or risky. The studio, and The Secret Life of Pets by default, is uninterested in being interesting, using the most generic building material possible to construct a nondescript house in the middle of suburbia. Nothing is memorable about this film except how unmemorable it is, a beige stain on a grey carpet.

The metaphor serves as a description of the film’s overall messiness. The Secret Life of Pets covers at least three subplots: one an Odd Couple lite story between main dog Max (Louis C.K.) and new arrival Duke (Eric Stonestreet); one a rescue mission led by Slate's love-struck Gidget; and one a revenge tale centered on an annoying rabbit voiced by Kevin Hart) in less than 90 minutes. Attempting to cover so much in such little time grants little to no proper development of any of those three plots. The writers even shoehorned a pair of fantasy sequences in to fill time in a movie where a lack of time is a major flaw.

Then there's the animation that, like Minions, The Lorax, and Hop before it, is never bad like Norm of the North, but is perpetually uninspired. That's vital for an animated film to create a world for the audience to get lost in, or at least replace the reality it eschews. Films like Zootopia and even the otherwise disappointing Finding Dory excel at fleshing out their fictional universes; The Secret Life of Pets has bothersome character designs and humans who always appear dopey in some capacity.

The Secret Life of Pets is a success because it isn't built for excellence. The film will sell toys and apparel, promote impending Illumination products (like more Despicable Me films) and keep kids relatively quiet for a spell in the summer. Pet owners will be somewhat charmed by the premise and the snuggle sequence at the end, although adults will more than likely leave a little unimpressed with the totality of the experience. That still counts as a success for Illumination; after all, it's nearly impossible to fail when the standards are this low.

Review: Two and a half out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: PG

Run time: 90 minutes

Genre: Animated 
 

Ask Away

Target audience: Families too bored to do anything else this summer.

Take the whole family?: A fair amount of scatological humor might make this a bit inappropriate for some families, but the overall tone is light enough to avoid being too problematic.

Theater or Netflix?: Take the kids to the matinee if you need to get them outside the house this summer.

How is the Minion short?: Pretty uninspiring. The short, Mower Minions, has a gaggle of the little yellow things attempt to do lawn work for money. It's pretty much the same general shenanigans the Babel Fish infected walking Twinkies have engaged in/earned the studio much profit from in the last couple of years. Like the film preceding it, it's not bad, but it isn't particularly clever either.

Watch this instead?: The other movie to come out this year featuring anthropomorphic creatures, Zootopia, is leagues better than this. You could also search around for the old clam shell covered VHS version of 101 Dalmatians and put that back in the VCR.