Cats

WHAT IT'S ABOUT:

A tribe of cats called the Jellicles must decide yearly which one will ascend to the Heaviside Layer and come back to a new Jellicle life.

WHAT WE THOUGHT:

Channel24 attends screeners for all films released in South African cinemas for reviewing purposes.

With the release of Cats there were no pre-screenings of the film made available to the media. This is usually an indication that the film is so bad that distributors don’t want the media to see it before its release.

Turns out that was exactly the case for the feline fiasco that opened in American cinemas last week already.

Since Channel24 couldn’t watch the movie before it’s released we turned to the top international film critics for their comments on Cats.

Here are just some of the reviews the film has received:

Peter Travers, Rolling Stone Magazine

"Attention, moviegoers searching for the worst movie of the year: We have a late-breaking winner. Cats slips in right under the radar and easily scores as the bottom of the 2019 barrel — and arguably of the decade. Even Michael Bay’s trash trilogy of soul-destroying Transformers movies can’t hold a candle. What happened?"

Alison Willmore, Vulture

"There is something magical about the simple fact that this movie exists, in all its obscene, absurd wonder, its terrible filmmaking choices and bursts of jaw-dropping talent. It doesn’t need to be timely to be an artifact of its time — a movie about nothing but song and dance and, most important of all, about cats."

Kevin Fallon, Daily Beast

"I was sold a trainwreck, and I’m annoyed I didn’t get it. While the Cats movie is not the unmitigated disaster that trailers and production reports hinted at, it is arguably something much worse. For a movie starring Taylor Swift, Idris Elba, and Jennifer Hudson about a cult of teeny-tiny cats who sing and dance in hopes that Judi Dench will choose them to die, Cats is incredibly, confusingly boring."

Richard Lawson, Vanity Fair

"After seeing Hooper’s film, I’m certainly left with more questions than answers. It’s an existential quandary, this 110-minute journey into a computer graphic phantasmagoria, revolting and briefly alluring, a true grotesque that sings, in fits and starts, a faint siren song. It’s by no means a good movie, and I left the premiere ready to toss an easy critical bomb at it and be done with rotten old 2019. But the more I sat with Cats, or with the, uh, memory of Cats, the more I realised how much I don’t want to outright hate it. It’s an ugly stray who smells bad and should not be invited into your home, certainly. And yet it is its own kind of living creature, worthy of at least some basic compassion."

Brian Lowry, CNN

"Critics and skeptics of the movie, admittedly, have been waiting to pounce, and the catty remarks won't be charitable. Then again, when you put together a target as ripe as Cats, it stands to reason that people would unleash the hounds."

Compiled by Herman Eloff