Cats (2019)

Cats was a film that had a lot of notoriety before I even saw this film because it was apparently terrible and it had a 2.7/10 on IMDB. Its directed by Tom Hooper who is a director I like. I think The Damned United is a brilliant film and The Kings Speech is also brilliant. I haven’t seen Les Mis but its meant to be good so it was quite surprising that Cats got the negative reaction that it did but recently it seems that people are quite quick to give a film a kicking.

Plot is a group of cats are trying to get picked to have another life which is given to them by Judi Dench and Idris Elba captures the other contenders so he is the only one that gets picked. I’m not a huge fan of musicals and think that only the old ones like Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and Mary Poppins. The film wastes no time in starting the songs. As the film progresses we are introduced to certain people who are going to be chosen but we are of course introduced to them via song. James Corden and Rebel Wilson were clearly there to be comic relief and I normally find Corden to be irritating but I actually thought that he was one of the best things in it. He’s actually quite funny and Rebel Wilson is also funny. 

The problem with this film is that the songs get in the way. There was no breathing space between the songs. They would get a couple of lines in before they burst into song so the plot never really gets going and we know everything we know through song. 

Cats isn’t as terrible as the 2.7 would suggest but its not much better. This version I saw was slightly different to what originally came out as they worked on the special effects and if they did then they did it well because I was quite impressed with the effects. As I said a musicals fan so I cant give this film a big thumbs up but I think that it was a brave attempt by Tom Hooper which ultimately didn’t work out.