Brooke Horan Williams corrals her favorite take-downs of the newly-released musical.
AUSTIN, TX / ACCESSWIRE / January 9, 2020 / Since the first trailer was released, Brooke Horan Willams‘ hopes have not been high for this stage-to-screen adaptation. Cats, the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, first premiered 38 years ago in the London Theatre in 1981 where it ran for 21 years. It ran on Broadway for 18 years, and between the two runs, had a combined 16,434 performances. Whatever your opinions may be concerning the content of the show itself, there’s no contesting that it has been a wildly successful endeavor, and will go down in history.
Hollywood Reporter: “Cat-astrophic.”
LA Times: “‘Cats’ is both a horror and an endurance test.”
Boston Globe: “My eyes are burning. Oh God, my eyes.”
The movie might be going down in history as well, but for wildly different reasons. Brooke Horan Williams reveals the review embargo on the film has been lifted, and the critic reaction to the star-studded adaptation has not been kind.
By all means, it sounds like a recipe for success: take a long-established, successful Broadway hit, add a hard-hitting cast comprised of both contemporary celebrities and legendary auteurs, spice it up with modern-day special effects, and you should have an easy hit on your hands. Unfortunately, it seems like the 2019 cinematic revival of Cats is more litterbox worthy than box office hit.
Reviews have been absolutely scathing, and Brooke Horan Williams is finding more entertainment in them than she assumes she’ll find in the movie. Den of Geek calls it “One of the weirdest and most garish monstrosities to be birthed out of the Hollywood studio system in this century.”
Screen Junkies says that it’s “A spectacular disaster…This movie feels like a prank but I don’t know on whom.”
At least part of the issues audiences seem to be having with the film deal with the CGI implemented in order to create the illusion of the actors being cats. Eschewing the garish costumes of the stage show, the cast has had their faces digitally inserted on strange, computer-animated bodies that are half-cat, half-person.
Brooke Horan Williams can’t help but be extremely disappointed with how Cats wastes its incredible cast: Ian McKellen, Idris Elba, Jason Derulo, Taylor Swift, Dame Judy Dench, Jennifer Hudson-the list goes on, but sadly, it appears none of this star power was enough to save the quality of this ill-advised remake.
The Daily Telegraph reported in, “Glad to report that Cats is everything you’d hoped for and more: a mesmerizingly ugly fiasco that makes you feel like your brain is being eaten by a parasite. A viewing experience so stressful that it honestly brought on a migraine.”
Not to be outdone, The New York Times chimed in, “It’s amazing to see what Adult Swim can accomplish with a $100 million budget. I never knew Tom Hooper was capable of making a surrealist nightmare that would rival Jodorowsky, that could baffle David Lynch, that would prompt even the dark god Cthulhu to emit an impressed eldritch shriek of ‘nehehehehehe'”
Perhaps most succinctly, The Beat claims: “Cats is the worst thing to happen to cats since dogs.”
