Cats – Film Review

A tribe of cats compete during the annual Jellicle Ball, where one lucky feline will be chosen to ascend to the Heaviside Layer and be granted a new life.

There came a moment in Tom Hooper’s feature film adaptation of Cats where I finally had to accept the fact that the film would quite literally not get a story. As I’m sure many of you are well aware of by now, I’m a massive fan of musicals. Few things make me smile more than seeing a musical executed beautifully on the big screen.

Most recently, a musical I loved was Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story – a film that had an incredible story at its core. Cats almost doesn’t even have a story. There’s only about four or five scenes in the entire movie where the titular felines actually have conversations that progress the story forward.

Almost every single second of this film’s one-hundred and ten-minute running time we spend watching the title cats dance around and sing their hearts out. To some, this may not sound too bad. But it becomes a huge problem when the songs themselves don’t even progress the story forward. They’re just a bunch of tedious nonsense.

Ever since it was released in 2019, Cats has received a ton of hate on the internet and it’s not hard to see why. But a lot of the hate directed towards the film has centered around the cats’ design, the editing, and creepy computer-generated imagery. Trust me, all of those problems are definitely there, but really, the biggest problem with Cats is, like I said – it has no story.

The final scene in the film is supposed to be this massive moment where tears are supposed to be shed. Musical cues swing in that are aimed at making us tear up, but all that’s going to happen when the credits roll, is a huge sigh of relief coming out of your mouth. Cats seems to think it’s a significantly more emotional movie than it really is. There’s not even a single moment anywhere throughout that’s remotely heartfelt.

And why did so many grade-A actors want to take part in this project? Dame Judi Dench and Ian McKellan feel so out of place here, it’s honestly kind of ridiculous. All they ever get to do in this film is prance around in a catsuit. It’s honestly kind of depressing.

It’s also unfortunate that the always amazing Taylor Swift has only a couple of scenes in the film, and, wouldn’t you know it? Her scenes are the best in the film. There’s a scene where she is singing “Macavity” that was honestly super fun to watch. But almost every one of the film’s characters get almost zero development along the way.

Cats is a humongous misfire on all fronts. It’s one of those insanely strange movies that you truly need to see to believe. Or, maybe you shouldn’t even watch it at all. That’s probably the better idea.