CATS

SPOILERS, KIND OF...

Confession: I don't generally like musicals. There's something I've never really understood about people suddenly bursting into song, backed by a full orchestra, while simultaneously launching into intricate dance routines. Certainly there are a few exceptions, maybe four or five of them, where I've been able to either buy into the form or overlook it, but as a rule it's not a genre I seek out. But man cannot live by eighties slashers and whizzbang superheroes alone and it does one good to occasionally try something else, something different. Well, it's different all right. Say what you like: you've never seen anything like this before. And you'll most likely never see anything like it again. Fortunately.

There isn't a plot so much: a bunch of cats in London's glittering West End compete, through the medium of song and dance, to be granted a new life, and we get a series of showstopping (if only!) musical numbers in which the star cast (Rebel Wilson, Idris Elba, Judi Dench, Ian McKellen) cavort about in digitally applied cat costumes in a motion capture hellscape. Which one will it be? The railway cat, the thieving cats, the old theatrical cat, the villainous cat, the magician cat, the Thames barge cat? Oh, the suspense... Except that there is no suspense because the lucky winner is blindingly obvious from first appearance so why are we wasting our time with all these others?

It's not just that Cats is unremittingly terrible: it's that there's no conceivable way that Cats could have ever been anything else but unremittingly terrible, and they knew that but went ahead and did it anyway. Every number goes on for at least one verse and chorus too long, and most of them aren't that great to start with, including the one major hit Memory. The whole thing is shot in mocap and slathered in CGI to the extent that it looks less like a live-action film augmented by computer effects, and more like a full-on Pixar nightmare that's got actual humans weirdly cut-and-pasted into it: even real things don't look real and it wouldn't have looked that much out of place if Buzz Lightyear had turned up.

But deep down, did I find a few tiny morsels of perverse pleasure lurking somewhere in this cataclysmic, catastrophic catalogue of wrong? No, no I didn't. It's an eye-opener, no matter how hard you struggle: you wonder what the hell possessed people you like and respect, proper A-list stars and James Corden to get involved (and then stay involved) in this high-budget monstrosity. Maybe it works on the stage in leotards and frightwigs: I haven't seen it and wouldn't care to guess but there are clips online to give you a clue, and they might well have got away with it if they'd done that here. But they didn't and the result is a rampagingly bad idea that so many people had the power to stop but failed to do so. This is on their conscience and I hope they can sleep at nights. And Andrew Lloyd Webber should have his lordhood taken away from him.

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