“…a career low for all involved”: The Guardian pans “Cats”
No amount of A-list stars can save Tom Hooper’s dire Lloyd Webber adaptation from being a career low for all involved
When asked at the world premiere of Cats on Monday if he was happy with how the film looked, director Tom Hooper replied wearily that he had finished it “at 8am the previous day”. Yet one wonders if more time spent perfecting the state-of-the-art digital fur technology in his baffling adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s smash-hit stage musical would have helped.
The original musical, based on TS Eliot’s 1939 poetry collection Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, is widely acknowledged as a plotless spectacle. That Hooper, who made 2012’s Oscar-winning Les Misérables, felt the story would lend itself to a feature film was optimistic at best. In a neon-lit junkyard somewhere in London’s West End, abandoned white kitten Victoria (the Royal Ballet’s Francesca Hayward) finds herself among a community of “jellicle cats” competing for the chance to ascend to the heaviside layer, aka cat heaven, where they will be reborn. Each cat must prove themselves by singing a song: one lucky winner is chosen by Judi Dench’s gender-flipped Old Deuteronomy (who has fur, but also, illogically, wears a fur coat). Much like season three of American Idol, there are tears, VIP guests and a thankless performance from the otherwise talented Jennifer Hudson.