The first reviews of ‘Cats’ are in me-ow: Review roundup

There was never any doubt Cats was going to be bonkers. From the trailer drop that created the single funniest day on the internet in 2019 to the dazed, screeching post-premiere reactions earlier this week, the content has been glorious, and at no point has there been any suggestion that this movie will be anything but a fuzzy, face-melting horror show, covered painstakingly in digital fur technology.

But weirdly enough, a running theme through some of the first reviews is that its bonkersness at least has a lurid, irresistible charm, that it commits so hard that you can’t help but be sucked in, that criticising it at all misses the point, that it feels almost cruel to tear it to shreds because it believes in itself so much.

That said, it’s also getting torn to shreds. (It’s currently sitting on an absolutely brutal 15% on Rotten Tomatoes.)

Mashable’s own Angie Han doesn’t mince words:

“To call Cats a cinematic experience unlike any other does not do justice to precisely how mind-meltingly bizarre Cats is. To say it must be seen to be believed is to undersell just how hard it is to believe it even once you’ve seen it. … Cats is a 110-minute exercise in disbelieving your own eyes, in feeling yourself becoming gradually unmoored from basic concepts like “time” and “space” and “reality.” Have you ever wondered what it feels like to try and gaslight yourself? Watch Cats, and you might get a taste.” 

Vulture’s Alison Willmore makes it sound like a kind of Stockholm Syndrome:

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. … There is something magical about the simple fact that this movie exists, in all its obscene, absurd wonder, its terrible filmmaking choices and bursts of jaw-dropping talent.

The New York Times‘ Manohla Dargis, who also refers to 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”:

“A doctoral thesis could be written on how this misfire sputtered into existence, though there’s nothing new about the films’ energetic embrace of bad taste. … In feline terms, this is a movie without epic hairballs, without rear-end sniffing, without a deep, wounding scratch. Instead the movie tamps down and tidies its innate strangeness, cutting carefully loose only in its more comic numbers.” 

Vanity Fair‘s Richard Lawson:

It’s an existential quandary, this 110-minute journey into a computer graphic phantasmagoria [is] by no means a good movie, and I left the premiere ready to toss an easy critical bomb at it and be done with rotten old 2019. But the more I sat with Cats, or with the, uh, memory of Cats, the more I realized how much I don’t want to outright hate it. … [The last half hour] may be enough for some people to declare the whole movie a success, and I envy that cheerful optimism. I hope many of you reading this can find that same pleasure in Hooper’s godless folly.”

Thrillist’s Esther Zuckerman, on this “absolutely deranged” film:

[T]he success of Cats, of course, is not dependent on silly things like “dialogue” and “plot.” It’s contingent on how well the performers and creative team can pull off the musical numbers. Here, they range from fully deranged to horribly dull. … When Cats was over I felt mildly intoxicated. (I had only had one glass of wine prior. Universal did however seem to be giving critics alcohol at all screenings.) My eyes readjusted to seeing people with people faces instead of cats with people faces. Stepping into the light, I felt like Grizabella coming out of the shadows. I had just been through hell, but emerged contented.” 

The L.A. Times’ Justin Chang on this “hallucinatory Razzie-courting mayhem”:

“Given how often the films 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 films. 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.”

The Guardian‘s Peter Bradshaw ambitiously wrote his review in verse, in a similar loping meter as T.S. Eliot’s original lines about Jellicles that gave birth to this mutant phantasmagoria:

The twitching of ears on their heads is distracting
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?

… And then Idris Elba comes on as McCavity,
(A boomy-voiced villain in anyone’s book)
There’s a prominent gap in his penis locality.
I honestly didn’t … well … know where to look.

The Daily Beast’s Kevin Fallon, under the headline calling it “a Boring Disaster Filled With Joyless Pussies”:

“The first 20-25 minutes of the movie are some of the most painful to sit through of any studio movie this year. It is that much of a slog. … People I talked to after the premiere were split, either surprised that Cats is basically a musical for children or disturbed by the latent horniness that underscored the movie. Both are true. Only the pure innocence of youth can truly appreciate the lunacy of this story, yet adults will likely spend the entirety of the movie wondering why they can’t stop thinking about fucking those cats.”

That aggressive horniness, despite the removal of Jason Derulo’s junk, is a recurring locus of discomfort, per Collider’s Matt Goldberg:

“Tom Hooper’s direction to his actors for this semblance of a plot was to act it super horny. That doesn’t give Cats a raw sexual energy as much as it makes everything incredibly uncomfortable… 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 Marissa Martinelli, a self-confessed fan, struggles to find anything particularly nice to say:

“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. … Die-hard fans of Cats will probably walk away with plenty of quibbles—like the choice to minimize the role of Rum Tum Tugger (Derulo), the contrarian cat, whose song is infuriatingly interrupted by dialogue despite being one of the best in the musical—while newcomers hoping to finally understand what all the Cats fuss is all about will probably walk away with more questions than answers.”

Pedestrian’s Alasdair Duncan, who describes it as “a fucking horror movie”:

Tom Hooper says he finished Cats at 8am on the day before the premiere, after a 36-hour editing binge. Frankly, that smells like bullshit to me. I’m pretty sure he was actually up in the projection booth, still putting the finishing touches on the film as we watched it. … I wish I could recommend Cats as some kind of ‘so bad it’s good’-style guilty pleasure, but honestly, it’s just bad. I would rather sit here and lick my own butthole than ever hear the words “jellicle choice” or “heaviside layer” again, or see Idris Elba‘s toned torso covered in CGI hair.

Cats is in theaters this Friday. You have been warned.