Genuinely "so bad it's good" movies are a rare breed, and even rarer still when it comes to Hollywood. Big studio releases with budgets more than $100 million tend to have a baseline competence of filmmaking. When they're bad, they tend to either be boring or offensive. Finding a big budget project so gloriously misconceived, so beautifully incompetent in its execution, is kind of a miracle for lovers of trash cinema.
Cats is that rare "so bad it's good" movie to come from a major studio. Well, some aspects of the film are genuinely good, but they're counteracted by so much stupid, creepy and pretentious awfulness that it all comes together into a fascinating train wreck. There's talented people both behind and in front of the camera, many doing great work here, but they're all working in service of a project that has no idea what it wants to be.
Is Cats supposed to be a heartwarming family film, a gleeful spectacle of musical nonsense, some furry's kinky fantasies brought to life or a serious piece of Oscar bait making a statement about (as director Tom Hooper puts it) "the perils of tribalism"? It tries to be all those things at once, without a hint of self-awareness at how ridiculous this whole enterprise is.
Let's start with some positivity about the one thing the movie genuinely gets right: the dancing. The choreography by Andy Blankenbuehler, the three-time Tony winner of Hamilton fame, is excellent, and the film features some of the best staged large-scale dance numbers we've seen on the big screen in quite some time. Even the tails are worked perfectly into the dancing! "Skimbleshanks: The Railway Cat" is particularly delightful in how it works in a continuous tap number over multiple fantasy locations. Whenever the movie's just trying to have a good time with all the singing and dancing is when it's closest to actually working as a movie.
Even these scenes, however, have one big impediment: how ridiculously creepy all the cats look. Ever since the first trailer drove the internet wild, the most striking thing about this movie is how deep the special effects dive into the Uncanny Valley, neither human nor cat-like enough to be comfortable to watch. How bad it is honestly depends on what angle the actors' noses are lit at; the single worst design decision is that they all have human rather than cat-like noses, and sometimes it's tolerable but other times it's just weird.
As if the humanoid cats aren't weird enough, Rebel Wilson's big musical number "The Old Gumbie Cat" also introduces humanoid mice and humanoid cockroaches (seriously). Wilson eats these cockroach-men in what is sure to be a favorite scene for vore fetishists. The much hyped "horniness" of Cats is real, though at times it is restrained to keep within a family-friendly PG rating, as Jason Derulo's complaints about the effects artists shrinking his "package" can attest to.
Derulo's Rum Tum Tugger character is also sadly robbed of all the gay subtext from the stage play. The "Mr. Mistoffelees" song, originally written as Rum Tum Tugger lavishing compliments on his crush (in some productions he even kisses Mr. Mistoffelees), has been changed into a bland heterosexual love ballad between Mistoffelees and Victoria the Dancing Cat.
Victoria, played by dancer Francesca Hayward, has been elevated to the movie's main character, and the center of the movie's biggest mistake: trying to give a ridiculous show about cats begging for a mercy killing into something deeply serious and meaningful. It totally fails. We're repeatedly told she feels like an outcast seeking belonging as a "jellicle cat" (don't ask what that means, they have a whole song trying to define it and we still don't know). Her struggle is never actually dramatized.
Victoria's new song "Beautiful Ghosts," co-written by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Taylor Swift for the movie, is the worst scene in the movie. It makes zero narrative sense; after spending half the movie at dancing parties, she... complains about how she was never invited to dancing parties as some sort of "take that" at Grizabella? Tom Hooper falls back on his boring old extended close-up technique from Les Miserables.
The cast is an extremely eclectic mixed bag. Ian McKellen is both the worst singer of the bunch and the best actor. Every time he meows, he makes it clear he's the one person who realizes what a camp classic he's in. James Corden is the most annoying part, pretty much just playing a series of fat jokes. Swifties might be disappointed that Taylor Swift only appears for a single song; and in it she drugs everyone with catnip and uses a weird British accent for some reason. Idris Elba is the big bad, Macavity, and the funniest (perhaps unintentionally so) part of the movie is how he keeps teleporting other cats in Thanos-like poofs. Judi Dench suffers from weird direction and even an actress of her greatness can't make the fourth wall-breaking closing number any less stupid, yet the movie clearly thinks it's somehow meaningful.
Who, if anyone, will see Cats when it opens up against Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker is a big question. Hardcore MST3K and Rocky Horror fans, however, might have a new favorite movie. Those with a more casual appreciation for trash cinema may wish to wait for the inevitable riffs and shadowcast screenings for maximum enjoyment.
Directed by Tom Hooper, Cats stars James Corden, Judi Dench, Jason Derulo, Idris Elba, Jennifer Hudson, Ian McKellen, Taylor Swift, Rebel Wilson and Francesca Hayward. The film opens Dec. 20.