Cats (2019) Reviews - Smashbomb

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Cats (2019)

2019 | Musical

110 mins United Kingdom United States

A tribe of cats called the Jellicles must decide yearly which one will ascend to the Heaviside Layer and come back to a new Jellicle life. Based on the Lloyd Webber musical, which was based on the poetry of TS Eliot.

Produced by	Universal Pictures
Director	Tom Hooper
Writer	Tom Hooper, Lee Hall and TS Eliot (book)
Cast	Idris Elba, Rebel Wilson, Judi Dench, Ian McKellen, James Corden, Taylor Swift, Ray Winstone, Jennifer Hudson and Francesca Hayward

Main Image Courtesy: Universal Pictures.
Background Image Courtesy: Universal Pictures.
Images And Data Courtesy Of: Universal Pictures.
This content (including text, images, videos and other media) is published and used in accordance with Fair Use.

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Added this item on Jul 18, 2019

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Cats (2019) Reviews & Ratings (16)

9-10			12.5% (2)
7-8			6.3% (1)
5-6			25.0% (4)
3-4			6.3% (1)
1-2			50.0% (8)

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Cats (2019) reviews from people you don't follow

Sarah (7800 KP) rated

Jan 15, 2020

Cats (2019)

2019 | Musical

2

3.8

(16 Ratings)

Movie Rating Watch

Stuff of nightmares

From the moment I saw the trailer, I knew I wasn't going to like this film. Having never seen the stage show, I went into this completely blind and to be honest, after 100 minutes of this nonsense I wish I was blind.

Usually I'll try to find something good to say about a film, but I'm really struggling with this. I feel like giving it a 2 is rather generous. Other than appreciating the amount of effort on the CGI and the song Memory, I really cannot identify any other good points whatsoever.

Now where do I start on the bad? The cats themselves are beyond disturbing. People dressed as cats in the stage show I can understand. Human features on cat bodies is just crazy and looks ridiculous. The fact that they alternate between 2 and 4 legged with human features, it beggars belief. I hoped I might get used to it, but i really didnt especially when they start hissing, preening and acting like real cats - it's terrifying and laughable all at once. The scaling of the cats against the scenery also looks a little misjudged, especially when they stand up.

The story and rest of the film doesn't fare much better. The songs (except for Memory) are surprisingly poor for an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, and no others are particularly memorable. The plot itself is also very thin and has barely any substance, the fact that they've managed to drag this out to 100 minutes is impressive. I also couldn't stand the words "Jellicle" and "Heaviside" - they sound like something from a kids cartoon and they began to grate on me very quickly. And the cast: James Corden, Rebel Wilson and Ray Winstone - just no. They are all so cringingly bad I could barely watch. And even acting royalty like Ian McKellen and Judi Dench don't survive this car crash intact. The final song and scenes with the direct address to camera is possibly the most embarrassingly cringeworthy thing I've seen in a long time.

It may only be January, but I doubt anything else I see in 2020 will be worse than this. I would have happily walked out of this 15 minutes in and never thought twice. The fact that I've sat through the entire thing made me want to claw my eyes out. I cannot unsee this.

If you want to watch a film musical about cats, watch The Aristocats. Do not waste your time on this!

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Nick Beaty (70 KP) Jan 15, 2020

"After 100 minutes I wish I was blind" 😂 Brilliant quote

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Awix (3310 KP) rated

Dec 24, 2019

Cats (2019)

2019 | Musical

5

3.8

(16 Ratings)

Movie Rating Watch

Here's where I wrinkle my nose up at the Smashbomb scoring system - Cats isn't so much 'shoddy' as - well, it's such a particularly strange film that it's actually quite hard to tell whether it's any good or not. My instinct is to say not: a selection of character actors, comedians and musical theatre stars are CGI'd into human-animal hybrids like something out of The Island of Dr Moreau and hoof and yowl their way through a selection of TS Eliot's comic poems set to music. The plot does a good impression of being absolute gibberish, as the singing cat-people compete to get sent off to the bit of the sky that radio waves bounce off where they will receive a new life, while Idris Elba schemes to rig the contest. It's just weird.

Alternatively, this is a quasi-Lovecraftian surreal Arabesque which, fatally, fails to consider the difference between presentational and representational performance modes inherent in the transference of a narrative between theatrical and cinematic contexts. (i.e., people dressed as singing cats in a theatre can be beautiful and moving; people CGI'd into singing cats in a big-budget movie is more disturbing than anything else.) Jennifer Hudson's maximum-Streep, maximum-volume onslaught on 'Memory' made me want to hide under my seat.

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Ross (3284 KP) rated

Jun 9, 2020

Cats (2019)

2019 | Musical

2

3.8

(16 Ratings)

Movie Rating Watch

I'd rather have licked my own bum

Just dreadful. I'm not much of a one for musical theatre at the best of times - trying to convey a story through only song is bound to fail and both the songs aren't good and the storyline doesn't land.
5 minutes in we are bombarded with use of the word "jellicle" without any context, repeated over and over again by haunting cat-people. To amuse myself, I replaced "jellicle" with "genital" and it brightened my mood somewhat.
But by that point the damage was done, I was annoyed by the film and the whole concept. I realised I was in for nearly 2 hours of different cats being introduced through the medium of forgettable arrhythmic song.
Luckily my wife had seen the stage show once (her words - "I saw it to say I'd seen it, never want to see it again") so had a little idea of the storyline (something to do with an annual competition to win an undefined prize which turned out to be a hot air balloon ride).
The visuals are not perfect and in order to detract from how hideous the idea was, they had to be.
So many decent actors (ok just Dame Judy and Sir Ian) wasted.
I have realised what sums this film up succinctly and appropriately:
If this film was a person, it would be Louis Spence.

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Sarah (7800 KP) Jun 10, 2020

This review made me laugh so much! Replacing "jellicle" with "genital" - genius 😂

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James Koppert (2698 KP) rated

Feb 15, 2020

Cats (2019)

2019 | Musical

5

3.8

(16 Ratings)

Movie Rating Watch

Unsure

Watched Cats and was it as bad as they say? Well we would have turned it off after half an hour had we not been so lazy so on it stayed. If you expected a movie it's not very good. If you see it as a visual experiance version of the actual play then it's not too bad.

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Cats (2019) reviews from people you don't follow

Andy K (10823 KP) created a video

Jul 18, 2019

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Teaser trailer

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Stephanie Neve (104 KP) Jul 19, 2019

Why

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Eleanor (1463 KP) Jul 19, 2019

Well that was scarier then the IT: Chapter 2 trailer......

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colin... (64 KP) rated

Sep 30, 2020

Cats (2019)

2019 | Musical

1

3.8

(16 Ratings)

Movie Rating Watch

As a man who has been through the musical theater ringer, I can confidently say that this is one of the worst things, if not the worst thing, that I have seen this year. It is incompetent at all of the aspects that set apart a musical from a normal film. The choreography is bland and uninspired, as it takes the most basic steps of ballet and refuses them to a nauseating degree. The singing on all parts is bone-chillingly awful, even for the people cast who can actually sing! The song to story ratio is obscenely high and doesn't give the audience any time to breathe whatsoever, especially my girlfriend who was in bewildered amazement and horror the entire time. As for aspects that fall under the actual filming aspect, the mocap is disgusting, the acting is subpar on all counts and the mess of a story resembles a poorly baked cookie just crumbling at the slightest breeze.

Thanks for ending the year off with a bang that we haven't seen since the Boston bombing.

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Emma @ The Movies (1786 KP) rated

Dec 27, 2019

Cats (2019)

2019 | Musical

5

3.8

(16 Ratings)

Movie Rating Watch

[Nostalgia enters the room looking cheery. A cat lurks in the background. Nostalgia starts tapdancing. Suddenly a red dot appears on Nostalgia's back and the cat savagely attacks it, leaving it bloody and beaten on the ground.]

As I've been saying to people... this film isn't good, but it's also not entirely bad, it has its moments.

Let's talk about the CGI first. You know what? It's not all that bad. Take out whatever you think about the concept of the human cats the fur in the second trailer looked much better than its first outing. During the film, Old Deuteronomy looked so fluffy I just wanted to pet her. The ear movements were pretty good, if a little consistent, it felt a little like they'd looked up cat actions in a book and taken the textbook description to animate rather than watching an actual cat. The cats as a whole could probably been a little larger compared to the "life-sized" staging around them because the ratio did feel a little off, but it wasn't really enough to make it off-putting.

Ever since I saw Cats at the cinema I've been singing the songs, but that's off the back of me listening to the stage recordings on Spotify and not the film versions. They don't quite have the same pep of the originals, watching them wasn't the wondrous experience I was hoping for. There are small exceptions. Taylor Swift was excellent and set a perfect tone for her number. Jason Derulo is a showman in this and after his Red Dwarf Cat-like clip in the trailer I was excited for his full numbers, they didn't disappoint.

Memory has to be my favourite song since seeing it on the stage and I was keen to see the talented Jennifer Hudson perform it. When it surfaced briefly I was worried, there was no impact, no heart... potential disaster. Finally the full number happened at the end and I was convinced. I listened to Hudson sing with such emotion that I cried, streams of tears and a quivering lip. It was beautiful.

The rest of the cast, while chockful of talent, didn't have quite the same buzz about it.

Francesca Hayward is a massively talented ballerina but the acting portion of the performance didn't quite hit the spot. This wasn't helped by the advert that has been running with her and Jennifer Hudson before the trailer was running before every film I watched for about two weeks.

I love Dame Judi and Sir Ian, and it was fun seeing them in this, but both had their issues. I wasn't a fan of Dench's moments of singing and the melancholy role of Gus for McKellen was a little unsettling. Who doesn't love seeing an Idris Elba film? He does the bad "guy" well but there was something wrong here too, I think that was partly to do with that fur torso.

It would be entirely possible to go on and on about this and all its ins and outs, but I don't think either of us have the time for that. I do feel that having the previous knowledge of Cats on the stage will help immensely when seeing this. That does also have some drawbacks though, when we saw it at the theatre it was a very interactive experience with the cats in the aisles with the audience and that's something the film can't compete with. I'm tempted to say that they should have forgone CGI aspects for the most part and had costumed cast. Making something more realistic when everything around it is unrealistic (in that it's not quite what we're used to as regular-sized humans) makes everything more confusing, perhaps the low tech angle would have made it a little less scary to some.

Originally posted on: https://emmaatthemovies.blogspot.com/2019/12/cats-movie-review.html

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Andy K (10823 KP) created a video

Nov 19, 2019 (Updated Nov 20, 2019)

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Trailer #2

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Lee (2222 KP) Nov 21, 2019

I'm the same, this trailer just freaks me out. My wife on the other hand cannot wait to see it!

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Matthew Krueger (10051 KP) Nov 21, 2019

Why is this happening!!!

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