In the Flesh: Cats (2019) (Patreon)

I can only assume Tom Hooper saw the 2003 The Cat in the Hat adaptation with Mike Myers and thought, “I can go lower.” Why else would a grown man spend millions conjuring up a creative vision which manages the stupendous feat of being both bizarre and tedious, except for sheer perversity of character? Whatever Hooper’s reasons, his Cats is an exercise in boredom, a film the hour and forty-nine-minute runtime of which feels like living through the siege of Masada in real time. One by one we meet a succession of fancifully-named anthropomorphic cats such as Skimbleshanks the Railway Cat and the magical Mr. Mistoffelees, who is a magician, and listen to them explain what their deal is via rambling, nonsense-heavy songs well-larded with (no pun intended) fat jokes and blows to the crotch.

Speaking of fat jokes, Hooper subjects his audience to two separate numbers built around them almost exclusively. First, Rebel Wilson’s odious rendition of Jenny Anydots the Gumbie Cat in which she scratches her vagina extensively while pratfalling and rolling around helplessly, and then the execrable Bustopher Jones number in which James Corden struts around talking about how much he likes to eat and Belvedering his own balls on the rims of garbage cans. Hooper inserts glib little asides during most of these songs where characters can say things like “me-ow” while the Rum Tum Tugger (Jason Derulo) sings a code-switching version of his titular bit with influences as fresh and challenging as “funk” and “soul, I guess”. Considering the bar the film sets for itself perhaps we should be grateful he doesn’t enter with “I’m the Rum Tum Tugger and I’m here to say/I like all the things you don’t/and I always get my way.”

Factor in another painfully miscast Idris Elba role, Ray Winstone showing up as a guy who growls a little and makes people walk a plank, and Dame Judi Dench as Old Deuteronomy sing-talking straight into the camera for what feels like hours as the film refuses to end like a toddler closing their mouth at a spoonful of peas, and Cats becomes something almost totally unique: pure insanity filtered through one of the most boring minds imaginable. One can’t say enough how unpleasant the cats themselves look, the movie’s dismal CGI rendering them a disturbing swarm of Polar Express homunculi constantly skittering down walls like vermin and prancing around in gargoylish poses. Their faces don’t quite scan correctly, their expressions lost in the digital white noise of their artificial skins and heavily touched-up prosthetic makeup.

There are a few songs which manage to summon a little something. Gus the Theater Cat’s (Ian McKellen) quavering number about his prime as an actor is moving, McKellen’s singing voice rich and unsteady and fittingly bright with passionate melancholy. The Magical Mr. Mistoffelees is a sparkling little ditty which performs well enough as the play’s Peter Pan moment. The rest ranges from odious to merely tepid, a cavorting nightmare circus featuring the voices of comedy second-stringers and Billboard Top 40 superstars thrown together without regard for the final effect. As the interminable final song lurched on and on, digging its nails into the fault lines in my skull, I found myself wishing I’d stayed in bed this morning and left Cats to the world’s lowest form of life: the theater kid. Good riddance.