cats movie reviews funny

21 Funny Reactions From Critics Who Thought The New “Cats” Movie Was A Catastrophe

Producer Andrew Lloyd Weber has had multiple musicals take over Broadway for decades and then eventually make their way to the silver screen . Results have been mixed, but people were legitimately afraid of what would happen when it was announced a movie version of Cats was being directed by Tom Hooper—and they had every right to be. The  Cats movie reviews are in, and folks, they are… not great .

Early clips and the trailer showed some pretty terrifying visual choices. While audiences might suspend their disbelief and enjoy a human dressed as a cat on stage for a couple of hours, a CGI mix of human and cat body parts is more horrifying than magical.

The film was released and everyone’s fears were confirmed. The movie is apparently awful, so awful in fact that Cats reviews have crossed over from being critical to being hilarious. They might be the best part of the whole thing:

I would pay to read a book of just Cats reviews. pic.twitter.com/3HTHxHH9Zf — Joseph S. Pete (@nwi_jsp) December 19, 2019

Below are some of the worst and therefore best Cats movie reviews from people who had to actually sit through the movie, plus a few reactions from folks just enjoying the whole mess. And really, isn’t that what true entertainment is?

pic.twitter.com/fDDa2rCGdL — Alex Sievewright (@AlexSievewright) December 19, 2019

this is my review of cats pic.twitter.com/88o4dt7b1b — David Farrier (@davidfarrier) December 19, 2019

Glad to report that Cats is everything you’d hoped for and more: a mesmerisingly ugly fiasco that makes you feel like your brain is being eaten by a parasite. A viewing experience so stressful that it honestly brought on a migraine. — Robbie Collin (@robbiereviews) December 19, 2019

Me watching #CATSmovie : WHY human faces and human hands? Why so small? What is Judi Dench’s fur coat made of? How do they poop? How did I get here? Why so boring? Who is responsible for this? What hath cat-manity wrought pic.twitter.com/z4b0ysQ800 — jen yamato (@jenyamato) December 19, 2019

The Cats reviews are out and I can’t stop laughing. pic.twitter.com/4GaPEuJSuZ — Samantha Joyce (@SamJoyceBooks) December 19, 2019

I don’t really know what to say about CATS at this early stage, since a perfectly credible reaction like “it’s one of the worst pieces of art I’ve ever witnessed” can only sound like empty hyperbole. Maybe I should just wait a few months. — Guy Lodge (@GuyLodge) December 19, 2019

I love bizzaro, crazy, break into song & dance stuff & #CATSMovie was easily the most boring thing I’ve ever seen. Dancing was good & Jennifer Hudson’s “Memory” was stunning but I coulda easily napped & been fine. I spent a lot of time wondering what drugs Hooper was on. — Yolanda Machado (@SassyMamainLA) December 19, 2019

And yes, all the CATS are horny AF but neutered and there’s a prostitute cat, which my friend wonders why a cat needs to prostitute themselves for money? milk? What is the CATS currency? AND WHY DO SOME WEAR FUR COATS OVER THEIR FUR? No lo entiendo! #CATSMovie — Yolanda Machado (@SassyMamainLA) December 19, 2019

Me watching CATS: https://t.co/SF4ZyNMYdd pic.twitter.com/NzqdmenwQD — Matt Goldberg (@MattGoldberg) December 19, 2019

The reviews for #CatsMovie has inspired new levels of creativity for reviewers and I could not be more here for it pic.twitter.com/F1kq2v1eJj — River Wells (@riverhwells) December 19, 2019

Cats reviews are in! pic.twitter.com/0oy17h6FrV — sar ✨ (@screaminggogogo) December 19, 2019

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18 Of The Funniest Audience Reviews For "Cats"

"Best horror film of the year!"

BuzzFeed Staff

By now, I'm sure you know all about Cats and how everyone LOVES it.

I mean, the Rebel Wilson cockroach scene really says enough on its own, TBH.

Being back in my hometown for the holidays (which has like, ONE bar, by the way) has led me to a new favorite hobby: reading Rotten Tomatoes user reviews of Cats .

Here are some of my favorite reviews I've found:

1. this person who was disgusted by horny cats :.

2. This person with a wild conspiracy theory:

3. This tired soul who just wants to nap:

4. This person who LOVES the lack of teen pregnancy:

5. This person who desperately needs help:

6. This person who will not be getting a kitten anytime soon:

7. This person who has HAD IT with furries :

8. This person who's lost all hope:

9. This time-traveler:

10. This person who seems unclear on the concept of musicals:

11. This cat elitist:

12. This person who found a silver lining:

13. This helpful Star War s fan:

14. This person with an alternative suggestion:

15. This stubborn soul:

16. This person who converted to furrydom:

17. This person who just wants to see cat butts:

18. And finally, this person who pretty much summed it up:

In conclusion: I have no words.

Share this article.

These Brutal Cats Reviews Are Better Than the Actual Movie

There is no shortage of feline puns.

Every product on this page was chosen by a Harper's BAZAAR editor. We may earn commission on some of the items you choose to buy.

There are good reviews, there are bad reviews, and then there are the Cats reviews.

The reviews for Cats —which, in an unsettling coincidence, broke the same time as the impeachment vote—are absolutely brutal, ranging from unsatisfied to downright disturbed. What I could have only best described as "freaky" and "a hot fever dream," film critics have characterized as "a monstrosity," "a descent into madness," and "nearly as obscene as The Human Centipede ."

Now, it's easy to assume the writers are overreacting. Maybe they're taking the film too seriously, or maybe they don't understand that Andrew Lloyd Weber's original theatrical masterpiece—which itself is an adaptation of T.S. Eliot's 1939 collection of feline poems —transcends practical narrative structure. But, as someone who watched the musical on VHS growing up, sung along with the Broadway cast recording, and crawled around an auditorium in furry spandex for my own high school's production of the musical, I can assure you, they're not.

My school's rendition of Cats in 2010 was interrupted by a minor fire onstage due to a pyrotechnic accident during the Mr. Mistoffelees number, which caused some audience members to evacuate mid-production (no one was hurt; the show went on like nothing happened). And yet somehow I was more terrified—and, I'll admit, sometimes giddy—watching Tom Hooper's digitally-enhanced film adaptation during a press screening this week.

Does this mean you shouldn't watch Cats at all? No. You should absolutely watch Cats . If you're a diehard fan of the show, you'll ogle at the choreography and sing "The Rum Tum Tugger" in your seat. Although the digitized film cannot compare to the bewilderingly entertaining live performance, it is definitely the kind of movie you just need to experience yourself.

But if you're only here for the bad reviews, read the roughest (and funniest) ones below—if you can stomach all of the hairball and litter box puns.

We Watched Cats on Opening Night and Lost All Nine Lives — The staff of Jezebel .

Cats : A Broadway Musical Adaptation Straight Outta the Litter Box — Peter Travers, Rolling Stone . Plus this dek: "This disastrous attempt to bring Andrew Lloyd Webber’s hit musical to the screen shouldn’t happen to a dog."

Cats Is Good. Cats Is Bad. Cats Is Cats . — Alison Willmore, Vulture . In the review itself, she adds, "To assess Cats as good or bad feels like the entirely wrong axis on which to see it. It is, with all affection, a monstrosity."

Cats review: a sinister, all-time disaster from which no one emerges unscathed — Tim Robey (who gave the film zero stars), The Telegraph .

Cats review – a purr-fectly dreadful hairball of woe — Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian .

Watching Cats Is Like a Descent into Madness — Matt Goldberg, Collider .

Cats Review: I Have Seen Sights No Human Should See — Alex Crans, io9 .

Cats Is A Nightmare That Won't End — Jill Gutowitz, ELLE.com .

The Cats Movie Is a Boring Disaster Filled With Joyless Pussies — Kevin Fallon, Daily Beast .

The movie Cats doesn’t even know what the musical Cats is about — Aja Romano, Vox .

Cats review: Movie musical is a total disaster — Johnny Oleksinski, New York Post . His lede, however, is the real kicker: "Please wipe this movie from my 'Memory.'"

Cats Review: A Tragical Mess of Mistoffelees — Richard Lawson, Vanity Fair .

Cats review: You won't leave the theater purring — Rafer Guzmán, Newsday .

Cats Film Review: Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Feline Fantasy Musical Becomes a Garish Hairball — Robert Abele, The Wrap .

Cats Is Impossible to Review — Adam Nayman, The Ringer .

Cats Review: Going to the Dogs — John Anderson, The Wall Street Journal .

Cats leaves behind a memory that's best forgotten — Brian Lowry, CNN .

Cats review — musical mess is one for the litter tray — Kevin Maher, The Times .

Oh God, my eyes — Ty Burr, The Boston Globe .

Cats review: Nearly as obscene as The Human Centipede — David Sexton, The Evening Standard .

Cats : Spay It — Scott Tobias NPR .

Other pieces with tamer titles contained gems in the text, like this nugget from Manohla Dargis of The New York Times : "[Hooper’s] mistake is that he’s tried to class up the joint. What a blunder!"

And there's brutal blow from Peter Debruge of Variety :

"Sadly, this uneven eyesore turns out to be every bit the Jellicle catastrophe the haters anticipated, a half-digested hairball of a movie in which Hooper spends too much energy worrying about whether the technology is ready to accommodate his vision and not enough focusing on what millions love about the musical in the first place."

And this from Leah Greenblatt of Entertainment Weekly :

"Even after 110 tumbling, tail-swishing, deeply psychedelic minutes, it’s hard to know if you ever really knew anything — except that C is for Cats , C is for Crazy, and C is probably the grade this cinematic lunacy deserves, in the sense of making any sense at all."

The one from Justin Chang of The Los Angeles Times too:

"There is a strange scene — OK, there are many strange scenes — near the end of 'Cats,' the flailing feline phantasmagoria coming soon to a movie theater and/or shroom party near you."

Erica Gonzales is the Senior Culture Editor at ELLE.com, where she oversees coverage on TV, movies, music, books, and more. She was previously an editor at HarpersBAZAAR.com. There is a 75 percent chance she's listening to Lorde right now. 

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In 1939, T.S. Eliot published a book called Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats , filled with poems he had written about cats to amuse his godchildren. A far cry from  The Waste Land , almost 20 years before, Eliot's poems are sweet and sneakily profound, detailing different kinds of cats, their behaviors, personalities, and mysterious self-involvement.

When you notice a cat in profound meditation, The reason, I tell you, is always the same: His mind is engaged in a rapt contemplation Of the thought, of the thought, of the thought of his name.

Andrew Lloyd Webber took these poems, wove them together loosely, initially envisioning it as a concert or a chamber piece. Nobody saw the smash hit coming. How could you predict something like "Cats"' success? You couldn't. After a triumphant run in London, it moved to Broadway, where it promptly smashed every record in the book, becoming the fourth-longest running show in Broadway history. The appeal of the show is somewhat mysterious to me (and I've seen it twice. It was the second Broadway show I saw as a child), but obviously throngs of audiences have thrilled to it. Tom Hooper ("Les Miserables," " The King's Speech ") has brought "Cats" to the screen, not doing much to it (what's to be done, really?), and over-producing much of it (the sets feel self-consciously referential, almost to the point of irony, but not quite). He casts some big names like Taylor Swift and Jennifer Hudson , and fills it out with lesser-known performers, as well as an enchanting newcomer named Francesca Hayward , a principal ballerina at the Royal Ballet, who plays " Victoria ," the wide-eyed innocent cat thrust into a strange new world.

"Cats" features grown humans crawling around in furry suits pretending to be cats. There are some who will find this unbearably silly. Embarrassing even. I suggest these people never take an acting class or a movement class. They wouldn't last five minutes! "Cats" has a lot of issues, issues also present in the theatrical production (which didn't seem to matter to the audiences who flocked to it for 18 years). The story is thin, to say the least. There's almost no conflict. The structure of Cats is basically a talent show for cats, where the prize is a trip to the "Heavyside Layer" (i.e. "Heaven"), a place where the chosen cat moves on to the next of their (presumably) nine lives. It's a resurrection fantasy, a dream of cleansing and purification (all things which T.S. Eliot had very strong feelings about).

In the opening sequence, Victoria, abandoned by her owners, is taken under the collective wing of the gang of street cats known as "Jellicle cats." They sing a song explaining "Jellicle cats," but since the lyrics are almost totally incomprehensible during all the group numbers (a problem throughout, and it's inexcusable), it's hard to get a line on what is going on. Different cats take the spotlight, and perform a number about who they are. "Jennyanydots" ( Rebel Wilson ) is a lazy tabby who wreaks havoc at night. "Bustopher Jones" ( James Corden ) is a street cat decked out in tail-coat and spats. "Mr. Mistoffelees" ( Laurie Davidson ) does magic tricks. "Skimbleshanks" ( Steven McRae ) commandeers railway cars with the power of his tap-dancing. 

Over all of this jazz-hands talent-show activity looms the there-and-not-there Macavity ( Idris Elba ), perched on the tops of buildings like an ominous bat-signal. Macavity shows up to wreck everybody else's "act," for no discernible reason (he's got Iago's "motiveless Malignity," to quote Samuel Taylor Coleridge). Taylor Swift plays Bombalurina, Macavity's gun moll sidekick. Many of the cats do their number and are never seen again. "Old Deuteronomy" ( Judi Dench ) is the wise elder cat, and the master of ceremonies. (A nice callback: Judi Dench was cast in the original London production, in the dual role of Grizabella and Jennyanydots. In fact, Trevor Nunn refused to come on board as director unless Dench was cast. Dench dropped out at the last minute, after snapping her Achilles tendon. Her appearance here has a lot of resonance for those who know the history.) 

The central figure, besides Victoria, is Grizabella (Jennifer Hudson), a bedraggled cat who's the "Delta Dawn" of the cat world, shunned by the rest of the cats for her disreputable past. Grizabella sings "Memory," a show-stopping song based (loosely), on Eliot's poem Rhapsody on a Windy Night . It's a song about memory and moonlight and ... honestly, I get a little lost, trying to follow what she's so upset about. But the song is about the music, not the words: it's written for a major voice, with its slow build and thrilling finish. (I saw Betty Buckley do it, and the entire audience practically seized up when she hit those notes on "Tooouch meeeeee!"). Hudson does not disappoint, filling the lyrics with rage and pathos. (Watch what she does with "I must wait for the sunrise." Hudson's Grizabella is pissed  when she sings that. Hudson makes sense of her character, personalizes the character, and sings the hell out of the song, all while wearing a cat suit. That's a pro.)

"Cats" suffers from a problem common in contemporary filmed musicals. The musical doesn't trust the audience, doesn't trust that the dancing in and of itself is exciting enough to hold our interest. There are all these dance numbers in "Cats," and Hooper spends so much time cutting around, changing angles, flying up to the ceiling, manipulating the images. You're denied the sense of sustained movement, denied the simple pleasure of watching dancers dance. If you go back and watch musicals in the 1930s, it's instantly clear how much we have lost. You are allowed to watch Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers create the dance together, in real time. The camera follows them. The takes are long. There are only a couple of sustained shots in "Cats," and they stand out for the pleasure they bring. There's one moment where Hayward pirouettes in a large circle around the room, and the camera follows her, and it's a lyrical moment of graceful fluid movement. She's allowed to do the beautiful thing she knows how to do, and we're privileged enough to watch.

There's not nearly enough of that in "Cats," but I enjoyed the film for what it is. It's "London's Got Talent" for the feline set.

Sheila O'Malley

Sheila O'Malley received a BFA in Theatre from the University of Rhode Island and a Master's in Acting from the Actors Studio MFA Program. Read her answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

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Film credits.

Cats (2019)

Rated PG for some rude and suggestive humor.

110 minutes

Francesca Hayward as Victoria

James Corden as Bustopher Jones

Judi Dench as Deuteronomy

Jason Derulo as Rum Tum Tugger

Idris Elba as Macavity

Jennifer Hudson as Grizabella

Ian McKellen as Gus the Theater Cat

Taylor Swift as Bombalurina

Rebel Wilson as Jennyanydots

Laurie Davidson as Mr. Mistoffelees

Mette Towley as Jemima

Robert Fairchild as Munkustrap

Steven McRae as Skimbleshanks

Ray Winstone as Growltiger

Larry Bourgeois as Plato

Laurent Bourgeois as Socrates

Zizi Strallen as Tantomile

Eric Underwood as Admetus

Melissa Madden-Gray as Griddlebone

Writer (poetry collection "Old Possum's Books of Practical Cats")

Writer (musical).

• Andrew Lloyd Webber

Cinematographer

• Christopher Ross
• Melanie Oliver

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‘Cats’ Reviews: What the Critics Are Saying

By LaTesha Harris

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After its official trailer debuted in November, many were equal parts horrified and enraged by the litany of humanoid cats preparing for the Jellicle ball and Jellicle sacrifice in “Cats.” Based on Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical of the same name, said outrage came to no one’s surprise.

Unfortunately for director Tom Hopper and team, the rage has extended into the film’s debut, with critics effortlessly tearing the film to shreds.

The almost 40-year-old tale of the Jellicles has been no stranger to condemnation, annoyance and outright shame. Despite a star-studded cast including James Corden (“The Late Late Show”), Dame Judi Dench (“Skyfall”), Jason Derulo, Idris Elba (“Thor: Ragnarok”), Jennifer Hudson (“Dreamgirls”), Ian McKellen (“The Hobbit”), Taylor Swift (“The Lorax”) and Rebel Wilson (“Pitch Perfect”), the film looks to receive no different fate.

However — based on the Broadway musical’s unprecedented commercial success and longevity — we can’t rule out a box office smash fueled by pure hatred.

“Cats” debuts in theaters Dec. 20. Here’s what critics have to say about the fantastical spectacle:

Variety’s Peter Debruge:

“The King’s Speech” director Tom Hooper’s outlandishly tacky interpretation seems destined to become one of those once-in-a-blue-moon embarrassments that mars the résumés of great actors (poor Idris Elba, already scarred enough as the villainous Macavity) and trips up the careers of promising newcomers (like ballerina Francesca Hayward, whose wide-eyed, mouth-agape Victoria displays one expression for the entire movie). From the first shot — of just such a blue moon, distressingly fake, flanked by poufy cat-shaped clouds — to the last, ‘Cats’ hurts the eyes and, yes, the ears, as nearly all the musical numbers, including ‘Memory,’ have been twisted into campy, awards-grubbing cameos for big-name stars in bad-CG cat drag.

From the moment a teaser trailer hit the web last summer, the studio has been reeling from the ridicule, seemingly blindsided by harsh attacks on the character designs, the visual effects and the very notion of adapting the hit show. Truth be told, it should have anticipated the backlash. None of it would have mattered if the movie were halfway decent. Sadly, this uneven eyesore turns out to be every bit the Jellicle catastrophe the haters anticipated, a half-digested hairball of a movie in which Hooper spends too much energy worrying about whether the technology is ready to accommodate his vision and not enough focusing on what millions love about the musical in the first place.”

The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw:

“As they gaze at the greenscreen and sashay and crawl, It’s weird to behold them all gurning and acting, And why do so many resemble Darth Maul? Did director Tom Hooper intend this appearance? Did it make him feel happy — or cause him some stress? We have to assume that he gave it his clearance But THE MAN HIMSELF KNOWS and will never confess. These are the Jellicle felines of legend, All elbows and shoulders and undulant arms. Each male in the cast looks a bit of a bellend, And those bizarre whiskers don’t add to their charms.”

Vanity Fair’s Richard Lawson:

“The real villain here is Hooper, who has conceptualized a movie that claims to honor its performers while smothering them in digital makeup. Why even bother hiring the elastic, fluid dancers if their bodies were going to be rendered so inhuman? Or, rather, so unnatural–they’re not supposed to be humans, after all. In doing so much to make the world of ‘Cats’ something approaching credible, Hooper completely fails imagination, ignoring the disbelief happily suspended for decades by the millions of fans of the stage musical. Nothing is accomplished by turning ‘Cats’ into a garish CGI experiment, and just about everything is lost. The wacky texture of Webber’s surreal creation is made too literal, and is thus forsaken. As is the charm of Eliot’s weird little odes to neighborhood kitties–I much preferred when Mr. Mistoffelees’s magic was a joke to explain missing household items instead of actual magic.”

Entertainment Weekly’s Leah Greenblatt: 

“The plot, essentially, could be written on a slip of blotter acid: A scampering throng of spandex-y, alley-stalking strays assemble in the late-night streets of London for a sort of tomcat talent show, deciding which among them they will ritually murder — sorry, “send to the Heaviside layer” — by dawn.”

Vox’s Alissa Wilkinson:

“Now I’ve seen it, and my own brain feels turned to glitter, much like the sequined blue cat ears on a headband I was handed at the press screening. It is ludicrous and kind of divine, furry and flabbergasting, absurd and, in some moments, weirdly touching. It is a film that resists ordinary treatment and, especially, ordinary reviews.

I left without any idea of what I thought, only that I was exhilarated and baffled and kind of impressed, all at once. I had no idea what to say, only observations and questions written in my notebook, many of which conflict with one another. I present them now, with a whisker of editing, for your contemplation.”

Slate’s Marissa Martinelli:

“I suspect that Hooper’s version of ‘Cats’ will be met with the same amount of gleeful bafflement as the stage show, if the (overblown) horror over the movie’s ‘digital fur technology’ when the trailer was released in October is any indication. Hooper responded to the criticism by dialing back the fur so the characters look more human, and the movie is better off for it, though still a little unsettling. (Just when you think you’ve reasonably settled into the uncanny valley, Idris Elba’s coat comes off and you’re sucked even deeper into a void of horny confusion.) The hoopla over the trailer put Hooper in an awkward position, because if ‘Cats’ is not completely weird, can it rightfully still be called ‘Cats’? It’s not my favorite musical by a long shot, nor is it even Lloyd Webber’s best. But ‘Cats’’ uncoolness, its willingness to be silly and self-serious and spectacular at the expense of taste, is its greatest strength, and Hooper’s version understands this.”

The New York Times’ Manohla Dargis:

“I could go on and must go on — yet how to explain the seemingly unexplainable, beginning with a narrative and language that borders on the gnomic? A doctoral thesis could be written on how this misfire sputtered into existence, though there’s nothing new about the movies’ energetic embrace of bad taste. One problem is that ‘Cats’ was directed by Tom Hooper, a well-behaved journeyman (‘The King’s Speech’), who is nowhere near vulgar enough for the challenge he was hired for, which is to translate Andrew Lloyd Webber’s money-printing musical to the big screen.”

IndieWire’s Eric Kohn:

“Hooper’s ‘Cats’ adaptation delivers on those expectations and then some, which makes it a fascinating mess of exuberant musical numbers and scintillating digitized sets. Those human-cat terrors already looked ridiculous slinking about a giant junkyard set in body-suits; who thought that closeups would actually improve the show?

But there’s the rub: The argument against ‘Cats’ also makes the case for its existence, because everything ludicrous about the show has been cranked up to 11, with a restless artificial camera and actors so keen on upstaging one another with excessive song-and-dance numbers they may as well be competing for a Heaviside Layer of their own. It takes some ambitious swings and works on its own terms in fits and starts, all while not really working at all. Like the T.S. Eliot poems that inspired it, ‘Cats’ is an elaborate lark.”

CNN’s Brian Lowry: 

“Ultimately, ‘Cats’ feels like a conspicuous waste, in what the studio is describing as an ‘epic musical.’ If the goal was to provide a holiday musical event that’s fun for the whole family, it’s a good idea in theory, packaged in the wrong litter box.

Critics and skeptics of the movie, admittedly, have been waiting to pounce, and the catty remarks won’t be charitable. Then again, when you put together a target as ripe as ‘Cats,’ it stands to reason that people would unleash the hounds.”

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Cats is exactly as crazy as you thought it would be: Review

Leah Greenblatt is the critic at large at Entertainment Weekly , covering movies, music, books, and theater. She is a member of the New York Film Critics Circle, and has been writing for EW since 2004.

What is Cats ? Music, madness, a hairball in the cosmos.

Ours is not to wonder why this storyless story, this whiskered wisp of feline disco, became one of the longest-running musicals of all time , and now a movie so arbitrarily full of stars that it assembles some form of EGOT in almost every frame: Dame Judi Dench, Taylor Swift, Idris Elba, Ian McKellen, Jennifer Hudson, James Corden, Rebel Wilson, those fantastic rubberband twins who dance with Beyoncé .

The plot, essentially, could be written on a slip of blotter acid: A scampering throng of spandex-y, alley-stalking strays assemble in the late-night streets of London for a sort of tomcat talent show, deciding which among them they will ritually murder — sorry, “send to the Heaviside layer” — by dawn.

They sing(!), they teleport(?), they rub noses a lot; nobody ever seems to need a litter box. A bright-eyed little kitten named Victoria (lovely newcomer Francesca Hayward, a principal ballerina with the Royal Ballet) is the new girl on the block, alternately hazed, ignored, and welcomed by the Jellicle crew: a jolly kitchen mouser named Jennyanydots (Wilson), Jason Derulo’s serial seducer Rum Tug Tugger (are cats supposed to be that… pelvic?), rotund chicken-bone-chaser Bustopher Jones (Corden), the wand-wielding Mr. Mistoffelees (Laurie Davidson), petty larcenists Mungojerrie and Rumpleteazer (Danny Collins and Naoimh Morgan), and Swift’s Bombalurina, a purring burlesque queen with an approximately British accent.

Elba’s leering Macavity desperately wants the Heaviside prize, but he’s too nefarious, a classic Shaft baddie in a crumpled fedora and fleabitten coat. McKellen’s trembling, fragile Gus the Theater Cat is clearly too far across the rainbow bridge already. Could the prize go to Jennifer Hudson’s outcast Grizabella, a sad-eyed lady of mange but dignity?

She sings the hell out of the show’s centerpiece, “Memory,” no less than three times, so that’s not the worst bet. But the final decision lies with Dench’s Old Deuteronomy; she sees everything, and chooses who ascends in the Great Glittery Air Balloon to tabby heaven. (She also has maybe the finest singular moment of face acting in the whole film, right toward the end).

The aim is clearly dramatical-fanatical, allegorical, metaphorical, statistical, and mystical . But Oscar winner Tom Hooper ( The King’s Speech , The Danish Girl ) doesn’t so much direct the action as duly place Andrew Lloyd’s Weber musical on camera. Even after 110 tumbling, tail-swishing, deeply psychedelic minutes, it’s hard to know if you ever really knew anything — except that C is for Cats , C is for Crazy, and C is probably the grade this cinematic lunacy deserves, in the sense of making any sense at all. And yet that somewhere under the Jellicle moonlight, it is somehow, too, an A++. Grade: C+

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Cats Review

No special effect can save you from the contents of this litter box., the best worst movies ever made.

Cats’ special effects render director Tom Hooper’s star-studded adaptation of the Broadway classic a lifeless disaster, though a few of its more charismatic cast members, namely Judi Dench and Idris Elba, manage to get a few licks in to add an alluring, ironic camp value.

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The effanineffable, deep and inscrutable, singular Cats

This movie is indescribable. Let’s try.

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Truly, the most spectacular movie of the holiday season is Cats , and I write this half-expecting the movie’s marketers to use that as a pull quote on the poster. There’s simply no better word to describe this fantasia. The trailer , featuring very famous people with cat fur and unnervingly placed tails singing songs from the 1981 Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, broke the internet and people’s brains. Rarely have I been at a party in the last few months without the conversation turning to Cats .

Now I’ve seen it, and my own brain feels turned to glitter, much like the sequined blue cat ears on a headband I was handed at the press screening. It is ludicrous and kind of divine, furry and flabbergasting, absurd and, in some moments, weirdly touching. It is a film that resists ordinary treatment and, especially, ordinary reviews.

I left without any idea of what I thought, only that I was exhilarated and baffled and kind of impressed, all at once. I had no idea what to say, only observations and questions written in my notebook, many of which conflict with one another. I present them now, with a whisker of editing, for your contemplation.

Things you will see, and maybe never unsee, if you watch the movie Cats

Acclaimed thespian Ian McKellen, playing “Theater Cat” Gus (short for Asparagus), lapping up milk from a shallow bowl resting at chin height.

A chorus line comprised of humanoid cockroaches performing a dance presumably choreographed by a tiny cockroach Busby Berkeley.

Humanoid mice, singing.

James Corden, a.k.a. Bustopher Jones, eating everything in sight in a dumpster, as if he is Templeton the Rat in Charlotte’s Web .

Jason Derulo as Rum Tum Tugger, shimmying his hips from side to side as if butt-bumping invisible buddy-cats.

Idris Elba, as the conniving Macavity the Mystery Cat, with extremely green cat eyes.

And, his abs.

Rebel Wilson, who plays lackadaisical house cat Jennyanydots, unzipping her cat suit to reveal another cat suit below it, but that one is bedecked in a jazzy pink sequined suit.

Not one, but two instances of cats getting hit in their (perfectly smooth, Barbie-like) groins and crying out in pain.

Taylor’s Swift’s very smooth, defined, nipple-free cat bosom.

A surprisingly moving scene of Jennifer Hudson, as the beleaguered street cat Grizabella, absolutely losing it singing “Memory,” in a scene director Tom Hooper clearly pegged as the parallel to Anne Hathaway’s “ I Dreamed a Dream ” in his 2012 Les Misérables adaptation.

Jennifer Hudson being taken away to heaven in a chandelier attached to a hot air balloon.

Judi Dench sternly explaining that cats are not dogs.

Things you will not see in the movie Cats

Cat genitals.

Questions I have after watching the movie Cats

Is Cats a good movie?

Is it a bad movie?

Is the answer to both “yes”?

Why is there a whole movie just about taxonomies of cats, with a side plot about one lucky cat’s life literally ending, opening against the ninth canonical Star Wars movie ?

Why can’t Tom Hooper get through a single song without cutting every two seconds to a new shot? What does he have against letting us watch things happen for a little while before changing perspective?

Why, if they built giant sets so that the normal-sized people were cat-sized, are the cats exactly the size of ferrets?

Why exactly does “ Beautiful Ghosts ,” the song by Andrew Lloyd Webber (who wrote the original stage show in the 1980s) and Taylor Swift (who plays the slinky Macavity ally Bombalurina), sound so incredibly unlike the rest of the songs in the show? Shouldn’t Webber have been able to figure that one out?

Will “Beautiful Ghosts” win an Oscar?

Who is the evil genius who thought, You know what? Let’s make a piece of avant-garde performance art, cast a bunch of stars in it, and call it a blockbuster? How can I pledge that genius my fealty?

Is Mr. Mistoffelees really a magical cat?

Given how much CGI is being used here, how much of the dancing is really, actually good, and how much just got fixed in post-production? Is the lurking sense that this is all just animation the reason why none of the performances seem particularly amazing, except Hudson’s and McKellen’s?

How — how — was a show this bizarre and plotless, with songs this mediocre, one of the most successful Broadway shows of all times, on both sides of the pond? What was happening in the 1980s?

Is Cats ... like ... a secret metaphor for something ? Why can’t I figure out what it is?

Will this movie make all the money, or none?

Will the earnestly supportive parents of theater kids who take their teens to the movies over the holiday ever speak to their children again?

Did I love this movie?

What the hell is a Jellicle?

Final verdict on the movie Cats

It’s literally incredible. I hope I never see it again.

Cats opens in theaters on December 19.

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2019, Musical/Comedy, 1h 50m

What to know

Critics Consensus

Despite its fur-midable cast, this Cats adaptation is a clawful mistake that will leave most viewers begging to be put out of their mew-sery. Read critic reviews

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Cats videos, cats   photos.

A tribe of cats must decide yearly which one will ascend to the Heaviside Layer and come back to a new life.

Rating: PG (Some Rude and Suggestive Humor)

Genre: Musical, Comedy, Drama

Original Language: English

Director: Tom Hooper

Producer: Debra Hayward , Tim Bevan , Eric Fellner , Tom Hooper

Writer: Lee Hall , Tom Hooper

Release Date (Theaters): Dec 20, 2019  wide

Release Date (Streaming): Dec 20, 2019

Box Office (Gross USA): $27.2M

Runtime: 1h 50m

Distributor: Universal Pictures

Production Co: Working Title Films, Monumental Pictures, Amblin Entertainment

Sound Mix: Dolby Atmos, Dolby Digital

Aspect Ratio: Scope (2.35:1)

Cast & Crew

Taylor Swift

Bombalurina

Old Deuteronomy

Jennifer Hudson

James Corden

Bustopher Jones

Jason Derulo

Rum Tum Tugger

Ian McKellen

Rebel Wilson

Jennyanydots

Francesca Hayward

Robbie Fairchild

Laurie Davidson

Mr. Mistoffelees

Larry Bourgeois

Laurent Bourgeois

Mette Towley

Steven McRae

Skimbleshanks

Bluey Robinson

Ray Winstone

Danny Collins

Mungojerrie

Naoimh Morgan

Rumpleteazer

Screenwriter

Andrew Lloyd Webber

Executive Producer

Steven Spielberg

Angela Morrison

Debra Hayward

Eric Fellner

Christopher Ross

Cinematographer

Melanie Ann Oliver

Film Editing

Original Music

Eve Stewart

Production Design

Art Director

Tom Weaving

Ketan Waikar

Rebecca Pilkington

Set Decoration

Paco Delgado

Costume Design

News & Interviews for Cats

“Rotten Tomatoes Is Wrong” About… Cats

Watch Broadway Shows Online: 20 Live Musicals and Plays to Stream Now

Know Your Critic: Clarisse Loughrey, Chief Film Critic at The Independent

Critic Reviews for Cats

Audience reviews for cats.

A truly unforgettable disaster. Tom Hooper manages to take an already bad idea (Turning "Cats" into a live action movie) and makes it even worse than you could possibly imagine.

Anyone who says that this is the worst movie of the decade is clearly displaying either an ignorance of the majority of major motion picture releases or is simply engaging in hyperbolic vitriol because CATS is some of the lowest hanging fruit in theaters right now. Yes, it's gross to look at. Yes, it's a sonic pummeling. But no, CATS is far from the worst movie of the decade, much less the year. Any bad movie lover will be disappointed to find that it's a gawdy, confusing, and relentlessly obnoxious Broadway music adaptation...so it's your standard, completely normal Broadway musical adaptation. Please forgive my casual disregard for the medium, but I think it's safe to say that all things Broadway are for a fading, niche group of enthusiasts at this point. I'm sure those people will all go see this adaptation without much complaint. I'd like to point out to anyone calling out Tom Hooper's CATS for the admittedly weird CG design of the characters that strolls down to the uncanny valley is hardly a far cry from what I normally see and feel every time I watch a superhero movie. Something is off. It looks unreal. I'm looking at nothing, but my eyes tell me that something is there. From the visual clutter of TRANSFORMERS to the de-aging of characters in a movie as fine as THE IRISHMAN, I have a hard time chastizing one and forgiving the other. It all looks like fake crap to me because I know it's not there. Compare this to hybrid visual composites like KUBO AND THE TWO STRINGS or the "Dark Crystal" netflix miniseries where it's obviously practical motion captured crafted materials enhanced by computer graphics. I think most people can ease into the unreality of those more because it isn't trying to sell the authentic reality of it at all. Be actually fantastical, or get outta my face with that ish. With that said, furries will yif for joy with all of the weirdly fetishistic posing and writhing going on here. I never thought I'd see Judy Dench splayed and kicking in any context, much less as a cat person, but I actually found Rebel Wilson and James Corden less repulsive with all of the extra hair. Idris Elba is obviously having a lot of fun doing his best cockney Wesley Snipes impression, and the rest of the cast are committed enough that at the very least the movie isn't terribly boring. I couldn't wait for it to end, but the same could be said of a lot of films I sit through. I think ultimately that the music of Andrew Lloyd Webber speaks for itself, and there is no denying the craft and years of onstage refinement that did most of the heavy lifting before it all culminated in this box office disaster. I just don't think it deserves all of the hate it's gotten. It's not so bad it's good. It's not so bad it's horrible. It's just bad.

It's far more enjoyable watching a cat lick it's own anal orifice. None of whom even attempt such self-indulgent grooming here.

I have two words for you: Cats. But that doesn't make sense, you say? Exactly. Back in college, it seemed like every performing arts major had that Harvey Edwards "Leg Warmers" photo hanging on their wall. You know the one with the well-worn stockings and the tattered, duct-taped ballet slippers in plié? It signified a commitment to T.H.E. T.H.E.A.T.R.E. - a world of over-enunciations, mid-Atlantic accents, treading the boards, finishing lines to the very end of one's finger tips, and playing to the back row! I'm convinced Cats was made for them, not only to enjoy but to be a part of in order to hone their "craft". I mean this in a loving, celebratory way. Cats may enter the history books as a gasp-inducing, surreal, plot-free nightmare of gargantuan proportions, but this one's for all the theater geeks who lived to strut across the stage and put on a show. It's that Theater 101 Class which decided to very publicly let the rest of the world in to see its students "be a cat" for a couple of hours. Tom Hooper, who turned Les Miserables, a show I genuinely love, into a fish-eyed, overwrought live singing, dutch-angled disaster, expands his repertoire a little bit here, but not enough to convince me he should continue directing musicals. He keeps things moving along but the script he co-wrote with Lee Hall doesn't do him any favors. I found myself entertained by individual moments, but nothing really adds up to a contained whole By now, I think everyone knows that Cats doesn't really have much of a story. A bunch of felines introduce themselves in song until an elder cat selects one of them for the honor of dying, going to kitty Heaven, and being reborn to experience the next one of their nine lives. Think of it as American Idol for the meow crowd, replete with its own Simon Cowell-esque villain. Idris Elba plays Macavity, who tries to destroy the competition by turning them into some type of mist and rebirthing them on a barge in the Thames! Yeah, that tracks. It all plays out like some long lost variety special from the 1970s. Google Shields And Yarnell if you have to, and then imagine them hissing and prancing around a soundstage as the words "Cats" and "Jellicles" bore their way into your brain. Francesca Hayward plays Victoria, an abandoned cat who acts as our entree into the Picadilly Circus world of our cast. Rebel Wilson pops in to pulverize a character named Jennyanydots, followed by James Corden doing the same with Bustopher Jones. Some lesser known actors show the big celebs how to do it right such as Laurie Davidson as the magician Mr. Mistoffelees and Robbie Fairchild as Munkustrap, who looks like a young Stephen Colbert in a cat suit. Jennifer Hudson oozes snot and phlegm as the tragic Grizabella, who oversings "Memory" but still managed to make me cry. Jason Derulo appears long enough to put down some outdated funk into our ears. Dame Judith Dench and Sir Ian McKellen appear as elder statescats and commit fully to their Glenda The Good Witch and Mr. Cellophane roles respectively. Taylor Swift appears long enough to convince us that her fake English accent on her hit "Blank Space" was no fluke. Still, I enjoyed her shimmying and sprinkling glitter down on the crowd from atop a descending moon…and that, my friends, is not a sentence I expected to write when I woke up this morning. Many have quibbled about being able to see Old Deuteronomy's (Dame Dench) wedding ring, but who cares? Unfinished CGI? Crew members in the background? Inconsistent proportions? Furry bodies with human hands and feet? Cats wearing furs made from other cats? Bring it! You're all literally crying over spilled milk. When nothing makes sense, why should anything? In a script where nothing builds from one moment to the next, the emotional ricochet of it all doesn't do character development or a plot any favors, but it does produce some standout moments. I enjoyed the Artful Dodger "Consider Yourself" type number by Skimbleshanks, the cat who lives on a train, especially when the cast dances on the tracks across London in an extra wide shot. Andrew Lloyd Webber, who created the stage musical and clearly has never met a melody he didn't repeat over and over, cribs from his Jesus Christ Superstar "Hosanna" song with Mr. Mistoffelees' big number, but damned if I wasn't singing along to it anyhow. Not everything works, of course. Most of it doesn't. The creepy CGI will haunt my dreams, replacing images of Linda Blair vomiting pea soup with uncanny valley humanoids shaking their furry asses in my face. I found what choreography I could see as being uninspired, although it's hard to tell when it gets chopped to bits. The color palette can best be described as Tim Burton's Alice In Wonderland threw up on Tim Burton's Charlie And The Chocolate Factory and out of the ooze came a mutant version of Moulin Rouge and Chicago. I even take issue with Old Deuteronomy's choice at the end. There's one cat who literally saves her life, yet somehow she doesn't consider that worthy enough. Besides, who really wants to win a contest where the prize is dying, hanging onto a Phantom Of The Opera chandelier attached to a hot air balloon and ascending to some place called the Heavyside Layer? No thanks, I'll take my chances in hell, Dame Dench! In conclusion, everyone should see Cats. I shouldn't be the only one. When as the last time you left a movie theater with your jaw on the floor? When was the last time you have no idea what you saw, but consider the three vodka tonics and discussion you had with friends afterwards to be a life highlight? When was the last time you saw a musical with only one truly memorable song? Ok, I know the answer to these questions is The Greatest Showman, but now you have Cats! Long live terrible movie musicals! Long live rubbernecking at accidents! Long live the theater nerds who just wanna show off their can-do spirit and give it the old college try! Long live Harvey Edwards! Long live Cats! Now and forever and probably just for the next two weeks at a theater near you.

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Critics’ Claws Are Out for ‘Cats’: A Roundup of Reviews

The trailer sent shock waves through the internet this summer. Now that they’ve seen it, what do critics have to say about the new big-screen adaptation?

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By Emily S. Rueb

When the first “Cats” trailer dropped in July, the internet convulsed with revulsion and awe. People were unprepared for the digital fur technology that was unleashed in the two-minute spectacle .

“If this messed up world doesn’t kill us first, ‘Cats’ will clearly finish the job when it opens on Dec. 20,” Garrett Martin of Paste Magazine wrote .

And with the release of the film this week, a similar tide of panic, confusion and anger has flooded the American psyche — or at least the psyches of those who have been exposed to the feature-length film that some fear they cannot unsee.

As of Thursday night, the movie had a 34 on the film review site Metacritic , a score based on the generally unfavorable reviews of 43 critics. It registered at 20 percent on Rotten Tomatoes , which offered this bit of punditry: “Despite its fur-midable cast, this ‘Cats’ adaptation is a clawful mistake that will leave most viewers begging to be put out of their mew-sery.”

Critics have complained that the stress of viewing the movie has triggered migraines and the urge to throw shoes at the screen . And yet, others have found they can’t look away.

Alex Cranz of Gizmodo said she saw sights no human should see: “I have been processing this movie for the last 24 hours trying to understand anything as terrifying and visceral a train wreck as ‘Cats.’ You have to see ‘Cats.’”

The New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis said that “a doctoral thesis could be written on how this misfire sputtered into existence, though there’s nothing new about the movies’ energetic embrace of bad taste.”

Among the many deliciously catty lines in her review — please read it here — was a description of Judi Dench’s Old Deuteronomy as “a Yoda-esque fluff ball with a huge ruff who brings to mind the Cowardly Lion en route to a drag ball as Queen Elizabeth I.”

The claws are out across the internet. We’ve gathered a few of the sharpest lines for your reading pleasure.

Better Left Onstage

Was adapting Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Tony Award-winning musical, which enjoyed decades of fame and profit around the world, a mistake? For many, the answer was yes.

“‘Cats’ turns the most vacuous stage musical of the 1980s into a big-screen litter box for the hammiest of stars to unload into,” Peter Howell of The Toronto Star wrote. The headline of his one-and-a-half-star review: ‘Cats’ is a dog — a big, dumb, loud one.”

The original stage show was marketed as a musical for the masses, Kevin Fallon noted in a critique for The Daily Beast . “Because it is legitimately insane, it made an entire generation of people think they hated musical theater. Wait ’til they see this movie!”

‘A Horror and an Endurance Test’

Among the chief complaints about “Cats” — the stage musical as well as the film — is the lack of a story line. Justin Chang of The Los Angeles Times described it as “a movie in which making sense was the very last priority” and summed up the plot as “Les Meowsérables.” He continued:

For the most part, “Cats” is both a horror and an endurance test, a dispatch from some neon-drenched netherworld where the ghastly is inextricable from the tedious. Every so often it does paws — ahem, pause — to rise to the level of a self-aware hoot.

“Unless you’re on strong mind-altering substances while you’re watching the film, you will either be baffled or bored by this pseudo-religious nonsense,” Nicholas Barber of the BBC wrote in his two-star review.

Peter Debruge, Variety’s chief film critic , said the director Tom Hooper’s “outlandishly tacky interpretation seems destined to become one of those once-in-a-blue-moon embarrassments that mars the résumés of great actors” and “trips up the careers of promising newcomers.”

What’s Up With the Fur?

One of the main draws of the film was supposedly the special effects to crossbreed feline and human anatomies using a technique called “digital fur technology.” The effects, however, have been most kindly described as “ creepy .”

“Millions of dollars and thousands of hours have been sunk into making the cats in ‘Cats’ look like hypertrichotic mutants from the Uncanny Valley Of Dr. Moreau, with tails and furry faces and hairless human fingers and toes,” Ignatiy Vishnevetsky wrote for The AV Club . “Their proportions in relation to the sets seem all wrong.”

David Rooney of The Hollywood Reporter offered this reminder to those who watched the trailer:

If you recoiled back then at the sight of British acting royalty with their faces stuck onto little furry bodies, or even just the jarring image of cats with human breasts, chances are you’ll still be covering your eyes and peering in a profoundly disturbed state through the gaps between your fingers at the finished film. At least until boredom sets in.

Not Safe for Children

“Anyone who takes small children to this movie is setting them up for winged-monkey levels of night terrors,” Ty Burr of The Boston Globe wrote.

“I truly believe our divided nation can be healed and brought together as one by ‘Cats’ — the musical, the movie, the disaster,” he said. “In other news, my eyes are burning. Oh God, my eyes.”

Matt Goldberg , writing for Collider , nodded to the onscreen sexual tension:

But if it wasn’t enough to make the cats horny ( why are they so horny ), Hooper also feels the need to make it gross by having them dig through trash and play up their animal instincts. “Cats” always feels like it’s two seconds away from turning into a furry orgy in a dumpster. That’s the energy you have to sit with for almost two hours.

Slate’s headline was succinct: “ The ‘Cats’ Movie Is a Void of Horny Confusion .”

Put It Out of Its Misery

Tyler Coates of Wired said the film was “awful”:

It has been a while since a big-budget, star-packed studio film has felt like such a disaster from start to finish. Befuddling, confusing, deeply ugly, and incredibly un-fun, I surely won’t be the only critic to recommend ‘Cats’ be put down immediately. What has for decades been something of a pop culture joke is now an even more wackadoo entertainment event. It’s almost as if Hooper and company were tasked with making the worst movie they could conceive of, that it was one epic troll — that could be the nicest thing I could say about it, that they have achieved something.

‘Not That Bad!’

“I realize that critique won’t be used in Cats’ advertising campaign,” Mara Reinstein of Us Weekly wrote. “But the musical does indeed have its merits — and is not nearly as disastrous as you feared.”

Richard Lawson of Vanity Fair also showed mercy and described the film as “an ugly stray who smells bad and should not be invited into your home, certainly.”

“And yet it is its own kind of living creature, worthy of at least some basic compassion.”

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Review: ‘Cats’ is a horror — and an occasional hoot

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There is a strange scene — OK, there are many strange scenes — near the end of “Cats,” the flailing feline phantasmagoria coming soon to a movie theater and/or shroom party near you. A bright new morning has dawned in London, and Old Deuteronomy, the wisest of the city’s scruffy tribe of jellicle cats, leans back to consider the surreal activities of the night before. Played by Judi Dench under what looks like a computer-animated shout-out to Bert Lahr’s Cowardly Lion mane, she sings a few lines of T.S. Eliot to the audience: “You’ve heard of several kinds of cat / And my opinion now is that / You should need no interpreter / to understand our character / You’ve learned enough to take the view / that cats are very much like you.”

It’s heartening to think that someone, somewhere, might learn something from “Cats.” The Oscar-winning English director Tom Hooper (“The King’s Speech,” “Les Misérables”) and his cast and crew probably will emerge with the most valuable lessons of all, though I doubt many will be inclined to share them publicly. Still, if you see this movie — and I offer that up as a hypothetical, not a recommendation — and arrive at the theater not excessively inebriated, you will indeed learn about several different kinds of cat, with stripe and spot formations as impressively varied as their personality types and domestication levels.

There is a lazy, bumbling “gumbie cat” named Jennyanydots, who here takes the form of an orange-coated Rebel Wilson. A “bravo cat,” Growltiger, lives on a barge on the Thames and is played by that sexy beast Ray Winstone. There’s a top-hatted magician cat named Mr. Mistoffelees (Laurie Davidson) and a nefarious “mystery cat” named Macavity (Idris Elba). In the opening scene, a shy, graceful white kitten named Victoria (Francesca Hayward) is rudely deposited in the London junkyard where all these jellicle cats prance and prowl. She plays the standard outsider role in this decidedly non-standard movie, serving as our cat eyes and ears on a wild night of singing, dancing, preening, licking, kidnapping, punning and other hallucinatory Razzie-courting mayhem.

If you are among the millions who have seen Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical adaptation of Eliot’s “Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats” — an improbable smash hit that ushered in the era of the Broadway blockbuster and remains one of the longest-running shows in history — then you are probably familiar with these characters already. If not, you will emerge from the theater fully in the know, with songs like “The Rum Tum Tugger” (that’s Jason Derulo) and “Mungojerrie and Rumpleteazer” (Danny Collins and Naoimh Morgan, respectively) skittering around in your head like tiny human-faced cockroaches, to borrow one of this movie’s more disquieting visuals.

The plot is basically “Les Meowsérables.” While some jellicle cats enjoy the comforts of domesticity, as we see in a few scenes of cake-munching, pillow-shredding decadence, most of them are alley dwellers, forced to raid the garbage for scraps or break into the local milk bar at night. As in the stage show, most of the cats introduce themselves with a sung monologue that doubles as an audition, offered up in hopes that Old Deuteronomy will make them “the jellicle choice” — the cat destined to ascend to the Heaviside Layer and receive the gift of a new life.

And there is, to be sure, some representational value to be gleaned from these cats and their singing suicidal Olympics. Given how often the movies tend to stereotype felines as smug, pampered homebodies, there are certainly worse characters one could spend time with, though I am hard-pressed at the moment to think of many worse movies. I say this with zero hyperbole and the smallest kernel of admiration. For the most part, “Cats” is both a horror and an endurance test, a dispatch from some neon-drenched netherworld where the ghastly is inextricable from the tedious. Every so often it does paws — ahem, pause — to rise to the level of a self-aware hoot.

You may have seen the best of it already. The movie has been the long-tailed butt of online jokes for months, following the July release of a trailer whose deeply discomfiting imagery — showcasing bold new advances in what is being called “digital fur technology” — seemed to unite the internet in a collective outpouring of derision and delight. There was reason to suspect, if not hope, that the mockery might have been overblown, that the movie itself would not achieve or sustain the same degree of awfulness. Surely the human eye would gradually adjust over two hours (good God, two hours) to what it could scarcely process in two minutes.

Not quite, as it turns out. To return to Old Deuteronomy’s words: Are these cats really very much like us? “Cats” insists that they are, and therein lies its problem — well, one of them. These felines are disturbingly humanoid creations, their celebrity faces adorned with cat ears and grafted onto matted, long-tailed bodies. They sing, dance, walk upright and sometimes wear jewelry and coats made of fur that is probably not their own. Curiously enough, for all this talk of digital fur technology, there appears to be no fur on the cats’ actual digits, their unnervingly human fingers and toes. And just to round out this nightmarish anatomy lesson, Hooper often directs his actors to splay their legs and bare their flat, undifferentiated crotches for the camera, none more frequently than Dench’s Old Neuteronomy herself.

But surely this is all (more or less) true to Lloyd Webber’s theatrical conception, you may wonder, perhaps recalling your own memories of stage performers in elaborate furry unitards, punctuating their songs and dances with purrs, hisses and other semaphoric feline gestures. But that was the right aesthetic for that live performance medium; it was an example of how inventive stylization and stagecraft could bring a fantasy world to vivid life.

“Cats” the movie is predicated on no such rationale. As a filmmaker, Hooper has a tendency to pick one grandiose formal conceit and stick to it, with a bludgeoning lack of imagination or modulation. His insistence on live on-camera singing and in-your-face closeups turned “Les Misérables” into one of the more vocally and visually monotonous movie musicals of the past decade. With its grotesque design choices and busy, metronomic editing, “Cats” is as uneasy on the eyes as a Hollywood spectacle can be, tumbling into an uncanny valley between mangy realism and dystopian artifice.

But then again, maybe this look was the appropriate choice for a movie in which making sense was the very last priority. At some point during “Cats” — I think I was trying to distract myself from the richly metaphorical image of James Corden sifting through garbage — it occurred to me that only one letter separates its title from Pixar’s “Cars,” to name another hermetically sealed, digitally polished, heavily anthropomorphized family-friendly entertainment set in a world from which actual human beings are creepily, apocalyptically absent. The burden of emoting, of bringing warmth and life to this CG-deadened nightscape, falls to the actors, some of whom perform and wear their feline physiognomies more gracefully than others.

Faring well enough is Ian McKellen’s Gus the Theater Cat, whose song about his glory days on the stage hits genuinely lovely notes of regret. Robbie Fairchild gives one of the movie’s more intuitive performances as Munkustrap, a jellicle guide who helps welcome Victoria onto the scene. For sheer musical proficiency, Taylor Swift is unsurprisingly best in show as Macavity’s henchwoman Bombalurina; she and Lloyd Webber also wrote an original song for the movie, “Beautiful Ghosts,” which the engaging Hayward shapes into an affecting rejoinder to the show’s signature tune, “Memory.” That song, sung by an aging jellicle outcast named Grizabella, falls regrettably flat here; that it’s being sung by an artist as talented as Jennifer Hudson makes it all the more bewildering, though her performance is admittedly of a bombastic piece with the movie she’s in.

“I remember / the time I knew what happiness was,” Grizabella sings. You will remember it, too, and you will know it again once you have ascended to your own Heaviside Layer, located just beyond the light of the exit sign.

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Despite an Oscar-winning director and an all-star cast, the movie version of blockbuster Broadway musical “Cats” is a creative cat-astrophe.

Dec. 18, 2019

Rating: PG, for peril, some thematic elements and rude humor Running time: 2 hours Playing: Opens Dec. 20 in general release

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Justin Chang was a film critic for the Los Angeles Times from 2016 to 2024. He is the author of the book “FilmCraft: Editing” and serves as chair of the National Society of Film Critics and secretary of the Los Angeles Film Critics Assn.

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‘Cats’ review: This is one weird furball of a movie

Movie review.

Sometimes, you watch a movie just feeling your brow furrow. If I look older this week, you can thank “Cats” the movie, which I watched in what can only be described as shell-shocked puzzlement, as questions rose up around me. Why do all the cats stand like they’re in a Bob Fosse show? Why is the scale of things so weirdly inconsistent — in the same scene, one cat successfully wears human shoes while another wears a human ring as a bracelet? Why is one cat, and only one, wearing pants ? What is Idris Elba doing here? And am I understanding the plot correctly: These cats are all vying to go to the Heavyside Layer, which basically means that the winner, um, dies?

As a person hopelessly fond of both cats in the abstract and the “Cats” musical specifically (it was the first Broadway show I ever saw, many years ago, and yes I still know all the lyrics), I approached this week’s screening with some hope, but only the teeniest bit. I had seen the trailers, and I am but human — this thing, with its people-in-strange-CGI-cat-suits, looked weird. And yes, “Cats” the movie is deeply, deeply weird, and not in a good way. Tom Hooper, whose “Les Misérables” showed he’s not entirely reliable with musicals (remember how Russell Crowe, in trying to sing, forgot how to act?), directed it; my cat could have possibly done better.

“Cats” the movie echoes the long-running stage show, which is basically a handful of T.S. Eliot poems about cats set to music; the movie adds a bit of dialogue and catsplains a few plot elements. It’s a competition to go to the Heavyside Layer and be “reborn,” we’re told, so every cat will sing a song about themselves. (We could maybe have figured this song part out?) Victoria (Royal Ballet dancer Francesca Hayward, a lovely presence) is at its center; a stray cat newly abandoned in central London, who wants to find a place in the herd. Old Deuteronomy (Judi Dench) is the group’s matriarch; Grizabella (Jennifer Hudson) its ravaged outcast; Macavity (Elba) its bad boy, and so on.

I remember how dazzling the dancing was when I first saw the stage show; the dancers seemed to become felines before my eyes, softly falling and stretching and jumping in a spotlight’s beam. “Cats” the movie has dancing in it, too — and some remarkable dancers, including Hayward, former New York City Ballet principal Robbie Fairchild and internationally acclaimed hip-hop duo Les Twins — but Hooper’s so busy moving the camera with every bar of the music, he kills the impact of it. (Blink and you’ll miss Les Twins.) And the choreography, by Andy Blankenbuehler (“Hamilton”), mishmashes every imaginable genre of dance into a muddle. Your eye can never linger, and so the movement doesn’t resonate; it’s just a bunch of people in cat suits jumping around. (This is not, alas, a descriptor that will sell tickets.)

Some of these people — Dench, Elba, James Corden, Ian McKellen (whose smile at the end of the Gus the Theater Cat song is the movie’s sweetest moment) — fare reasonably well; some less so. Hudson sings “Memory” like she’s mad at it (this Grizabella is super-irritated about having to wait for the sunrise); Rebel Wilson, as Jennyannydots, looks faintly embarrassed; Taylor Swift, barely in the movie, doesn’t do much to justify the grand entrance she gets.

By the final scene, by which my eyebrows were hurting from being raised so high (the winning cat goes to the Heavyside Layer in a chandelier ? What is this, “Phantom of the Opera”?), I was just tired. As was “Cats.” Meow.

★½ “ Cats ,” with James Corden, Judi Dench, Jason Derulo, Idris Elba, Jennifer Hudson, Ian McKellen, Taylor Swift, Rebel Wilson, Francesca Hayward. Directed by Tom Hooper, from a screenplay by Lee Hall and Hooper, based on the musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber and the book by T.S. Eliot. 109 minutes. Rated PG for peril, some thematic elements and rude humor. Opens Dec. 20 at multiple theaters.

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Tyler Coates

Cats Is as Terrible as the Internet Guessed It Might Be

Cats , depending on who you ask, is either a beloved musical from Andrew Lloyd Webber or a reviled musical from Andrew Lloyd Webber. Originally staged on the West End in London in 1981—and later on Broadway in 1982, where it ran for a record-breaking 18 years—the premise is quite simple: It’s about cats. Cats played by humans, specifically, in skin-tight costumes covered in feline markings, their faces painted like children at a small-town festival. They sing and dance, quite a bit, about cat stuff.

The show, as you know by now, was a hit, winning the Tony for Best Musical and earning poet T.S. Eliot a posthumous Tony nomination. (The musical, sung through without dialog, relies on Eliot’s collection Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats not just as its source material, but also for its songs' lyrics.) Reviewing the show for The New York Times , Frank Rich wrote: “[I]t's a musical that transports the audience into a complete fantasy world that could only exist in the theater and yet, these days, only rarely does. Whatever the other failings and excesses, even banalities, of Cats , it believes in purely theatrical magic, and on that faith it unquestionably delivers.”

Nearly four decades later, Oscar winner Tom Hooper has helmed a long-awaited—and star-studded—film adaptation. As he did with 2012’s Les Misérables , Hooper has brought this international musical behemoth to the big screen, with the help of celebrated actors Judi Dench, Ian McKellen, and Idris Elba, plus pop stars like Taylor Swift and Jason Derulo. (I suppose Jennifer Hudson, who didn’t win American Idol but did nab an Oscar for Dreamgirls , falls into both categories.) So how does this movie musical compare with the stage version? Does it transport the audience to a fantasy world that could only exist in the medium of film? Does it deliver on the promise of movie magic, in particular the “digital fur technology” its creatives have boasted so much about in publicity before the release? If you were a part of the collective internet freakout when the first trailer for the movie dropped in July, expressing what could only be described as international confusion and repulsion, you may not be surprised by what I’m about to tell you: Cats is awful.

It has been a while since a big-budget, star-packed studio film has felt like such a disaster from start to finish. Befuddling, confusing, deeply ugly, and incredibly un-fun, I surely won’t be the only critic to recommend Cats be put down immediately. What has for decades been something of a pop culture joke is now an even more wackadoo entertainment event. It’s almost as if Hooper and company were tasked with making the worst movie they could conceive of, that it was one epic troll—that could be the nicest thing I could say about it, that they have achieved something.

It’s not like the source material isn’t already bananas. Imagine: Grown-ass adults, coming together to make a stage musical about cats starring humans, scurrying and prancing across the stage for two and a half hours and singing wacky songs as part of a revue that culminates in the one ballad that everyone (even those who haven’t seen the show) actually knows. “Memory” has inarguably had a larger life than the show itself as a contemporary torch-song standard. ( Barbra Streisand has recorded her own version, as has former Pussycat Doll Nicole Scherzinger , who also sang the song on the West End when she played the role of Grizabella in a revival of the show.) For most people, the wait for that recognizable song is a long one; for anyone sitting down in a movie theater, the wait is slightly less long—the film runs two hours—but no less arduous. On the way to the finale, Cats requires audiences to sit through slapstick numbers by Rebel Wilson and James Cordon (both playing cats whose main traits are their weight and laziness) and deeply serious dirge-like songs sung by Dench and McKellen. There’s also a ham-fisted plot in which Idris Elba’s Macavity—a supervillain cat modeled on Sherlock Holmes’ nemesis, Moriarty—kidnaps the featured cats one by one in his own attempt to earn reincarnation.

About that plot. Cats the show is generally plotless, a musical revue that features these idiosyncratic cats performing songs that show off their individual habits and talents. Some might say that the show suffers for its lack of a story; others—me!—might say the plot is very simple: Once a year, the cats of London join together to celebrate the Jellicle Ball, an event at which one cat (chosen by the wise elder Old Deutoronomy, played here by Dench in a gender-flipped casting) will be reborn to start a new life. (“It’s just A Chorus Line , but with cats,” I’ve drunkenly said at parties more times than I can count.) The film takes great pains to make this even more clear, and it’s all seen through the eyes of the young Victoria, a beautiful white cat (played by ballerina Francesca Hayward) who is dumped on a London dock by her owner, and taken in by this feline tribe and ushered into the larger cat community. In the movie version of Cats the Jellicle Ball feels more like a reality TV competition, with each cat singin’ and dancin’ not just for the entertainment of their peers but for a trip to the Heavyside Layer. (Cat Heaven?) The evil Macavity, always slinking around in a fur coat and giant hat, tries to lure Victoria in under his wing, meanwhile kidnapping the other singing cats one by one to ensure he’s the only candidate left standing.

Julian Chokkattu

It’s the kind of competition where everyone should be voted off the scratching post. No one really comes out of Cats looking great. The audience at the screening I saw cackled almost every time Dench appeared on screen; Wilson and Cordon do their usual schtick; Elba and Derulo are notably not sexy. Hudson seems incredibly bored. Most of the female performers’ faces look too big for their heads, and you half expect those faces to slide right off like in a David Lynch movie. (They also have humanesque breasts , which as many online commentators have noted, is just weird.) Then there’s “Beautiful Ghosts,” the song Swift wrote with Lloyd Webber for the Victoria character, which … well, I’m terrified of Taylor Swift fans, so let me just say: Great ghosts, beautiful ghosts . Nobody sounds particularly great, and my suspicion is that Hooper had his cast sing live as he did, infamously , with Les Misérables —a real commitment to authenticity for a movie about cats with human faces, hands, and feet.

Ultimately, the appeal of Cats is entirely based on the humans who are in it. The show is all spectacle and absolutely ridiculous. But it’s a spectacle precisely because of the effort the performers put into it—as well as the creative endeavors of the costumers, the makeup artists, the choreographers. All of that is present, in theory, in the film; the large-scale sets are ambitious, the dancing is impressive. But it’s also all weighed down by the special effects, which makes the redeemable pieces pale against the messiness of the technology employed to make the human cast look more like cats. The result is something that looks very fake and extremely distracting, with no sense of proportion. (How big is a cat supposed to be? I’m not certain anyone involved in this did the math.) That Hooper admitted he was down to the wire, finishing the film mere hours before the movie’s New York premiere Monday night, makes it all feel like a group project spawned from the stoner minds of college freshmen, turned in just before the final deadline.

Surely I’m being too harsh. Perhaps this movie just wasn’t made for me. I mean, I do love Cats —I’ve seen the show four times, three times as an adult, not out of irony but out of genuine affection. But this movie did not bring that same level of joy, and it’s not even one I would recommend for an ironic viewing. Perhaps, then, this is a movie for a new generation of kids who will fall in love with the musical just as I did. As I watched Cats the other night, that was the idea I settled on. Then a young boy sitting two seats over from me sat straight up, turned to his mother, and said “I hate this!” So maybe not.

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Rejoice in all these hilarious reviews bashing the movie, 'cats', share this article.

The movie  Cats is coming out this weekend. Starting with the first glimpse of the trailer , which showed bizarre, nightmarish people-cats played by celebrities, prancing and singing around, it became clear that this movie was going to be  something. 

Good? Bad? Who knew? But good lord it was going to be  something. 

The reviews are in now, and yes, this movie SURE IS SOMETHING. It’s also apparently terrible, but in the best kind of way that has reviewers not even bother to hem and haw like they usually do, instead just rejoicing in how terrible this ridiculous movie is.

Look at these fantastic reviews of this terrible movie! Complete with cat puns!

“ Oh God, my eyes ,” wrote Ty Burr in the Boston Globe .

“This part-people, part-pussycat, faux-feline Hollywood hairball is a me-ouch ,” wrote Neil Pond in Parade . ME-OUCH! HE SAID ME-OUCH.

“ Woof ,” said Adam Graham in Detroit News , in a story that  also had the Me-Ouch pun!!

“Even after 110 tumbling, tail-swishing, deeply psychedelic minutes, it’s hard to know if you ever really knew anything – except that C is for Cats, C is for Crazy, and C is probably the grade this cinematic lunacy deserves, ” Leah Greenblatt wrote in EW .

We also had Cat-astrophe puns, which, yes please. Look at this one!

Glad to report that Cats is everything you’d hoped for and more: a mesmerisingly ugly fiasco that makes you feel like your brain is being eaten by a parasite. A viewing experience so stressful that it honestly brought on a migraine. — Robbie Collin (@robbiereviews) December 19, 2019

Watching CATS is like stumbling upon an unholy and heretofore unknown genre of porn. Every time these horny fur demons tongue a milk bowl and start moaning I was certain the FBI would raid the theater — Kyle Buchanan (@kylebuchanan) December 19, 2019

Anyway, I can’t wait to see  Cats.  Everyone go see  Cats.  Then we can write funny things all together.

Everyone roasted the bizarre new 'Cats' movie trailer

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