meow

So Cats is apparently as awful as implied. I plan to enjoy many savaging reviews, but this one from The Guardian is in rhyme, so you should enjoy it, too.

The Telegraph's is behind a paywall, so I will quote because the claws are out:

Pre-judging Cats based on the widely ridiculed trailers wouldn’t be fair, especially once you realise they did it a lot of favours. They hid the big numbers. They silenced the singing. Minimised were James Corden’s wobbly pratfalls into piles of dead fish, Idris Elba’s leering expressions, and the entire role of Ian McKellen as Gus the Theatre Cat. 

 

Once seen, the only realistic way to fix Cats would be to spay it, or simply pretend it never happened. Because it’s an all-time disaster – a rare and star-spangled calamity which will leave jaws littered across floors and agents unemployed. For the first time since the head-spinningly dire dadcom Old Dogs in 2010, I'm giving a film no stars....

 

It becomes a scramble to get out alive. What worked in the round off Drury Lane in 1981 – a  suspension of disbelief, with the whole cast pirouetting in cat-suits – has been converted into a computer-aided hellscape so off-putting you may suspect eye failure. Hooper's Cats has an impossible job recovering from its own surreally charmless visual... I can’t say style. Choices certainly abound. Not one of them is good.

 

Meanwhile, the Frankensteinian marriage of live performance, “digital fur technology” and human/cat anatomical splicing – the boobs! they have boobs??!! – has such endlessly sinister impact that the film's U certificate ought to be an 18....

 

But let’s not count our chickens quite yet. In come Jason Derulo as a sleazy playa called Rum Tum Tugger, and Corden’s greedy-guts Bustopher Jones, neither carrying a tune to speak of, and both made to strip off outerwear and get furrily naked, sans genitals. McKellen, meanwhile, is caught lapping backstage from a dish, tongue loose. It’s one of a thousand giffable moments an audience won’t be able to delete.