Today is my sister’s birthday and she decided that, to celebrate it during my country’s lockdown, we would all watch the Cats movie.
It’s safe to say that by the end of it we were all regretting her choice.
You want to know how bad the Cats movie is?
It’s so bad that all the terrible bad cat puns that could describe this eye cancer of a film have already been used and there are none left.
I can remember the first time I saw the trailer for the film and wondering what the people making this were smoking for them to think this cringe fest was going to be a hit.
Although, I suppose what with the stage production being one of the most successful musicals ever, there was no doubt in their mind that it would be.
Still, this unfortunate misreading of the situation could have been mitigated if the movie used practical effects and makeup for the cat people.
But nope, they had to go full CGI with it and make the cast of Francesca Hayward, Jennifer Hudson, Judi Dench, Idris Elba, Laurie Davidson, Robbie Fairchild, Ian McKellen, Jason Derulo, and many more look like mutated cat monsters that want to eat our faces, great.
And, to top it all off, the original stage production has barely any plot, with the only story element being that all of the jellicle cats (whatever jellicle means) are meeting to decide who will get a new life.

Director Tom Hooper tried to add a plot with Macavity serving as the overarching villain but this was incredibly forced and lacked any investment.
So, the majority of Cats consists of these creepy, one note cats introducing themselves in musical numbers that definitely do not match in tone.
There’s comedic numbers (none of which are funny), dramatic numbers (none of which are dramatic), and even horror numbers (I’m pretty sure they aren’t meant to be interpreted that way though).
I will give the movie some credit though, because some of the songs, like “Macavity” and “Beautiful Ghosts”, are actually pretty well sung, with Jennifer Hudson doing a fantastic job with “Memory.”
You just have to close your eyes so you can actually enjoying these songs by not having to see the fur demons.

Sadly, for every decent musical number there is a bad or horrifying one, like Rebel Wilson and James Corden’s songs.
However, it is not the creepy nature of the cats that I found to be the films worst attribute.
If anything, parts of the film can be watchable if you are expecting to be creeped out by these CGI abominations.
No, I found the worst part of the film to easily be how boring it is.
As I said, Cats is basically scene after repetitive scene of characters introducing themselves and then never being important again.
By the time the third cat had sung about themselves, I was already bored and just got less and less interested at each new cat’s introduction.
Occasionally the cats would do something that would make me cringe, which would temporarily get my interest back, but then it would just go back to more introduction musical numbers and I would lose interest again.

The best way that I can explain Cats is that it feels like it is walking on a tightrope.
If it falls to one side then it lands on creepy visuals that make you cringe, however, if it falls on the other side then it lands on boring scenes that have no investment.
Oh, and the film has absolutely no coordination so it is constantly falling to one side of the tightrope every minute, only for it to fall again when it tries to get back on.
Cats is easily one of the worst films of 2019.
It has almost no plot, the cat people are unnerving, and it’s boring.
Definitely not “the most joyous event of the holiday season” as the trailers advertised, although did any of us honestly expect it to be?