Cats hits cinemas today, and the majority of reviews for the movie are extremely negative. The internet was immediately perplexed when the Cats trailer premiered in July, and now that people have seen it, it doesn't appear reception has warmed at all. The adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber's classic musical is Oscar-winner Tom Hooper's second foray into the genre, after 2012's Les Miserables. But while that film was fairly well-received, most critics agree that his latest effort is a major misfire.
The film assembles an all-star cast, featuring James Corden, Judi Dench, Idris Elba, Ian McKellen, Taylor Swift and Jennifer Hudson, among others, as characters from the classic musical (which, originally, was an adaptation of a T.S. Eliot book). The film features most of the memorable songs from the play, including "Memory," which achieved international fame. It also employs a unique visual style, with the heavily-CGI-treated look of the human-cat mutants frightening half the internet since the trailer's release.
Cats currently has an 17% critics score on Rotten Tomatoes, based on 90 reviews from critics around the world. And the bad reviews have been overwhelmingly negative, with several of them spouting out comical lines about how awful the film is. So what exactly is the reason for all the negativity? Here's what critics are saying about Cats.
Ty Burr – Boston Globe
I truly believe our divided nation can be healed and brought together as one by “Cats” — the musical, the movie, the disaster. In other news, my eyes are burning. Oh God, my eyes.
David Sexton – London Evening Standard
There are moments when this film seems not so much an adaptation of a nonsense classic as a horror story, nearly as obscene as The Human Centipede.
Peter Debruge – Variety
Sadly, this uneven eyesore turns out to be every bit the Jellicle catastrophe the haters anticipated, a half-digested hairball of a movie.
Michael Phillips – Chicago Tribune
Is it the worst film of 2019, or simply the most recent misfire of 2019? Reader, I swear on a stack of pancakes: “Cats” cannot be beat for sheer folly and misjudgment and audience-reaction-to-“Springtime for Hitler”-in-“The Producers” stupefaction.
Justin Chang – Los Angeles Times
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.
Most of the critics who have seen Cats so far agree that it's not only bad, but a complete disaster. Critics thought there was too much CGI, the script completely lacked focus, and the whole thing was just generally bizarre and creepy. The visual style of the movie is in particular a focus of criticism, which has long looked likely to be the case. Ultimately, it seems the general public was right in writing Cats off when the trailer dropped during the summer. To be fair, there were some critics that, while still not giving a positive review, felt Cats falls less into the "irredeemably bad" category and rather felt it was merely weird (or so bad that it was funny).
Alison Wilmore – Vulture
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.
Leah Greenblatt – 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.
Brian Truitt – USA Today
A bunch of well-known celebrities get turned into singing, scenery-chewing digital kitties in the utterly absurd yet oddly charming movie musical version of the Broadway hit.
Jocelyn Noveck - Associated Press
Does all this work? Well, it depends on how you feel about ... "Cats." Did you love the show? You'll find stuff to love here. Did you hate it? Ditto! Or maybe ... you'll have both reactions? That's possible too.
The positive reviews – of which there were not many – highlighted the music as something that Cats actually did get right, which makes sense since that was after all was what turned the Broadway show into such a roaring success for so many years. Some critics also appreciate how unashamedly weird Cats is.
Maybe the world wasn't ready for this oddball of a musical film, but the general consensus on Cats has been overwhelmingly negative. Fans of the Broadway show may still find it worthwhile, and that audience may pull in enough money for the film not to be a total flop. But for any other cinemagoer, it seems their time would be best spent elsewhere.
