Cats

Watch the new adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber's Cats and you might wonder if director Tom Hooper (Les Misérables) had a personal vendetta against the composer. Did he set out to make the most repellent, obnoxious adaptation he could muster?

To make the sabotage as devastating as possible, Hooper chose a visual strategy at odds with the material. He shortchanges the wit and whimsy of poet T.S. Eliot's Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats wordplay in a noisy, antiquated soundtrack that drowns out what the performers deliver.

Onstage, the cats were clearly actors in costumes, but Hooper has decided to waste untold studio cash to make everyone on the screen look like the abominations from H.G. Wells' The Island of Dr. Moreau.

Thanks to malicious digital black magic, the actors never leave an eerie uncanny valley. They look like mutants ready to remove all human life from the streets of a stylized and not terribly convincing recreation of London.

Their slinking looks more like some painful disability than anything feline. Watching the cats' digital ears and tails wiggling as they sing gets distracting, but it does help keep viewers from suffering through the generally hideous production design.

Hooper seems to have referenced the paintings of Francis Bacon during pre-production, so some of the cats are covered with ragged, pus-emitting wounds that make viewers wonder if all the veterinarians in the English capital are on holiday.

It's hard to concentrate on Lloyd Webber's music when the wounded kitties look like they're suffering. The grimy, rundown sets might have worked for a gritty adaptation of West Side Story, but here it just looks as if Hooper wants to punish viewers when he's done with Lloyd Webber.

After hearing a score of rubbery synthesizers that sound as if they were left over from the '80s (the cats occasionally breakdance), an inconsiderate human tosses a bag out of her car containing the unfortunate Victoria (Francesca Hayward).

Starting a movie with someone tossing a pet in an alley is off-putting, and the movie never recovers. A group of swarming alley cats inform Victoria that she has been tossed aside on the night when Old Deuteronomy (Dame Judi Dench) will pick the cat who will be reborn into an ideal life. The stakes seem low because the cats will be reborn around nine times anyway, and the tunes they perform to argue their case range from forgettable jazz ditties to lifeless waltzes.

Having chorus lines of people dressing as mice and cockroaches makes Cats often play as if Busby Berkeley had discovered both color photography and crack. People in my audience were either laughing nervously or checking their corrective lenses.

There are some A-list performers like Dench, Ian McKellen, James Corden, Ray Winstone, Idris Elba and Jennifer Hudson.

Hooper seems to hate them, too.

Hudson delivers a heartfelt rendition of the musical's best-known song "Memory," but Hooper splits up what could have been a galvanizing moment by breaking the song up so that it never takes flight. Covering her cat fur with oozing sores doesn't help.

Elba looks as if he's emerged from a feline gym and forgotten to put on his clothes after the show. His glowing green eyes would work better in a horror movie. His cat wants to be reborn, so he sabotages the other contestants. Taylor Swift sings a new tune she wrote with Lloyd Webber in Elba's honor, but the new tune feels like a forced addition.

As I left for the warm, comforting light of the exit, everything outside the theater looked better than what was on the screen. Hooper is a capable, creative director, but you'd never know it from the furball he's just coughed up on the screen.

MovieStyle on 12/20/2019