Cats (2019)

There’s nothing quite like spending 110 minutes screaming inwardly.
And sometimes outwardly.

“Cats” (2019) was, as near as I can tell, about a breed of cats that were a direct affront to God who spent their time competing for a chance to die.

Victoria (Francesca Hayward) was abandoned by her owner in an alleyway in London, whereupon a colony of horrifying human-cat CGI demons found her and sang at her about the possibility of winning the Jellico Ball and ascending to the Heaviside Layer. 
It was never explained what Jellicos were nor what the Heaviside Layer was supposed to be, nor why any of them were so gosh-darned horny to die.
And no, I don’t think “Heaviside” was a portmanteau of “heaven” and “side.”
It just existed, to taunt us, as a plot device and an imaginary word.

This movie was a series of musical numbers loosely tied together with what could graciously be called a “plot line” - though that would be an insult to any other plot line in existence. It was based on the Broadway musical of the same name, which was based on a collection of poetry about cats by T.S. Elliot.
Thus, being a movie about musical numbers, each character got their own piece to sing to, most of which were terrible.

The piece that was supposed to be good (and the one song you’d probably recognize), ”Memories,” was ruined as Gabrizella (Jennifer Hudson) cried through the entire thing, making it weak and mumbly. Had she belted it out, a la “Let It Go,” it would have been a fantastic closing number for her character. Instead, we just watched her cry and dribble snot down her lip in every single scene she was in.

Old Deuteronomy (Dame Judy Dench) was an old cat who decided which other cats got to die. It’s never explained why she had that power, or why she’s the sole arbiter of death, but she was, and that’s all there was to it.

Gus, né Asparagus (Sir Ian McClellan), existed. Just existed.
He sang a sad song that was hard to understand and didn’t lend anything to the plot, and then he disappeared.

The sole ‘gumby cat,’ Jennyanydots (Rebel Wilson), tortured us as a feline version of Rebel Wilson. As far as I can tell, Wilson can’t do any roles besides her default “stupid ugly fat woman” bit. It stopped being funny after the first “Pitch Perfect” (2012).
In one horrifying scene, she unzipped her skin to reveal that she was wearing a vest and hot shorts over an exact copy of the same skin, and had trained a colony of mice and cockroaches to dance for her amusement before she ate them. 
I wish that was a sentence I made up.

Mr. Mistoffelees (Laurie Davidson) could do sleight of hand, which somehow turned into literal magic when everyone wished hard enough, because of course it did.

Macavity (Idris Elba), and his hench-cat, Bombalurina (Taylor Swift) were intent on getting rid of all of their competition so they could win the death-fetish ball. Bombalurina had one of the two tolerable numbers in this waking nightmare, but 30 minutes after the movie, I can’t remember anything about it other than the fact that it wasn’t terrible.

Meanwhile, the completely irrelevant character, Skimbleshanks the Railroad Cat (Steve McRae), had the best musical number in the movie. 
He sang about being a cat on a train: he tap-danced, sang clearly, and his song actually progressed and told a story. You know, with multiple verses and a proper chorus.

Why was that last bit worth identifying?
Because most of the songs were just one or two lines repeated ad nausea for approximately three minutes. 
Mr. Mistoffelees’s tune just repeated “Oh well I never, was there ever a cat so clever and magical as Mr. Mistoffelees” fifteen times.

The part of this movie that frustrated me the most was the CGI.
In the stage-play, the Jellico cats are people wearing weird cat suits. In this, the actors were wearing green-screen suits, which allowed for the addition of cat ears and full-body hair. 
Why they didn’t just put the movie actors in the same onesies as the stage actors is a mystery that I’ll never find closure to.
The terrible downside to this green-screen decision was that any time we saw the feet of an actor on the floor, the feet weren’t right. Sometimes they shimmered and twitched horribly, while other times they simply didn’t touch the floor at all, which made the large dance numbers look like a collection of videogame NPCs moving in sync. Even when two characters were right next to each other talking, the conflicting CGI renders often made them look like they’d been composited together into the scene, instead of actually working together.
The worst offender for this was an “outdoor” scene where the cats all sang and danced in front of a car’s headlights. The shadows didn’t translate properly and the reflection of the light off the road often made it look like the cats weren’t touching the ground at all.
The CGI ears were pretty good; they moved the way real cat ears moved, but that doesn’t make up for the feet.

There were multiple scenes of the “cats” eating things. Cockroaches, trash, other stuff. They all made me feel sick to watch.

There were a few times when there was just an orchestral soundtrack running in the background, no singing. Some of that was okay.

At no point during this movie was there a narrator to talk to the audience. 
So, for some reason, Old Deuteronomy spoke directly to ‘us’ as part of the last musical number, breaking the Fourth Wall in a completely narratively-inappropriate way.
Gabrizella’s number should have been the closing piece, but instead we got Deuteronomy’s misplaced monologue.

Please. Do yourself a favor. Do not see this movie.
Frankly, this made me never want to see the live-action musical either, so I’m glad I paid matinee pricing for the movie tickets instead of regular price Broadway tickets.
This movie wasn’t worth watching and didn’t have a plot that made sense either, with many points where I leaned over to Megan to ask “what on earth is going on?”

I will never recommend this to another human.
Maybe to a bridge troll.

A few comments from my family about this movie:
Dad: “Why?!”
Mom: “The tails all looked like monkey tails.”
Sister: “Not as bad as I thought it was going to be, but that doesn’t make it ‘good’.”
Brother: “I don’t want to be associated with this.”