5 of the Worst Slams From Reviews of Cats

'My cat could have possibly done better'
By Arden Dier,  Newser Staff
Posted Dec 19, 2019 12:06 PM CST

The distaste for the first Cats trailer was just a taste of things to come. Critics have taken their claws to the film adaption of Andrew Lloyd Webber's stage musical, featuring A-list stars including Jennifer Hudson, Taylor Swift, Judi Dench, and Idris Elba, which has a truly awful 17% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. How bad is it? Read on.

  • "Sadly, this uneven eyesore turns out to be every bit the Jellicle catastrophe the haters anticipated, a half-digested hairball of a movie," Peter DeBruge writes at Variety. He adds that "nine may not be enough lives for some of the stars to live down their involvement."
  • "The characters in Cats certainly come close to a particular vision of, well, catpeople? But that's the best that can be said" about the film, "an astonishing misfire on every other conceivable level," writes Adam Graham at Detroit News. Indeed, he calls it "the biggest disaster of the decade, and possibly thus far in the millennium."

  • "It's as messy as a cat's litter tray," writes James Mattram at the South China Morning Post, who describes "a mildly surreal, nightmarish quality." He gives Swift some credit, however, and notes director Tom Hooper "does not entirely blow it."
  • "By the final scene, by which my eyebrows were hurting from being raised so high … I was just tired," Moira MacDonald writes at the Seattle Times. As was Cats … basically a handful of TS Eliot poems about cats set to music," she adds. "My cat could have possibly done better."
  • "Even after 110 tumbling, tail-swishing, deeply psychedelic minutes, it's hard to know if you ever really knew anything—except that C is for Cats, C is for Crazy, and C is probably the grade this cinematic lunacy deserves," writes Leah Greenblatt at Entertainment Weekly.
(More movie review stories.)

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