Overall Rating
  Awesome: 3.8%
Worth A Look: 3.16%
Average: 6.33%
Pretty Bad: 9.49%
Total Crap: 77.22%
8 reviews, 110 user ratings
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| Cat in the Hat, The |
by Scott Weinberg
"This movie that sucks will make lots of bucks. There, I rhymed."
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Movies are made by professional filmmakers. Actors, producers, directors, screenwriters, etc. All of these people have seen a LOT more movies than has the average person. One could even say they're "experts" where motion pictures are concerned. And I guarantee that not ONE of the people affiliated with this particular movie could ever look you in the eye, with a straight face, and say "Yes, I think The Cat in the Hat is a good film." Nobody who knows anything about filmmaking could praise this vile stinkhole.You'll watch with a sneer and a throb in your head. You'll watch and you'll sit there and wish you were dead.
What's the only reason The Cat in the Hat won't be mentioned in the same breath as Rollerball, Heaven's Gate and Battlefield Earth?
Because it will be very profitable.
The list of assaults made on the medium of comedic or kid-centric cinema are absolutely endless, which says a lot considering The Cat in the Hat only 70-some minutes long. (Only in the movie industry can the masses be so obviously shortchanged and still line up like lemmings; seems unfair to charge moviegoers full price for something so truncated. The kids down the hall are getting 3+ hours of The Lord of the Rings for the same price.)
My mind simply reels at the depths to which some producers will sink to ensure a surefire payday. To try and define a "plot structure" would be a resoundingly undue compliment to the half-dozen script doctors who cobbled this lumbering husk into being, but here's the meat...
Two kids are left alone. A magical cat shows up, wrecks their house and then cleans up before Mom gets home. There's a talking fish, a sleeping babysitter, a smarmy neighbor and a few other mind-splittingly stupid additions...but really, who cares? People will line up to the cineplex trough because Hey, "The Cat in the Hat!" I know that book! Let's take the kids right now because the Burger King Happy Meals told us to!
This is a lifeless, pointless, plotless, stunningly obnoxious, casually racist and blatantly wretched excuse for a movie. It should be remembered and studied by film students as an example of what they should spend their careers trying to avoid.
Several critics more kind-hearted than myself have taken pains to point out the wildly colorful and bizarre production design found in this hateful abortion of a flick. Bah, production design in an of itself is hardly impressive. If a producer knows he has no script, no story, no jokes, no nothing (except, of course, for a very well known book title to exploit) then he spends big bucks on a Tim Burton-style production design. Big woop. The art directors may be better served by hitting the indie circuit and helping a few good movies get made.
As far as comedian Mike Myers, I'm just speechless. Rare is the mugging this incessant and irretrievably desperate. His presence here is completely and wholly...wrong. His painfully familiar vaudeville routine permeates every charmless scene, his belabored chuckles punctuate every failed punchline. His performance is a lazy and instantly detestable combination of The Cowardly Lion, Linda Richman and the Mike Myers who opts to drop his accent on a whim and just speaks normally. I'd berate his performance for being laden with decidedly "grown-up" material...but nobody's gonna listen to what I have to say.
Moviegoers love this crap, so why blame the filmmakers? The actors are there to earn their salaries, so they're relatively blame-free...if perhaps in need of a little more common sense. No, the person we can thank most is producer Brian Grazer...simply because his last foray into Seuss-dom (The Grinch Who Stole Christmas, of course) yielded huge profits for all involved. MORE Seuss movies were needed! Forget the fact that the Doctor's original "Cat" was a virtually plotless affair that was simply content to sing the praises of a child's overactive imagination. Nowhere in this source material could you ever find something this uniquely ugly.
No, Mr. Grazer had to churn this one out (instead of maybe investing the budget into a half-dozen other movies) and degrade your childhood recollections of a clever little book until they were overwhelmed by this deplorable adaptation and its omnipresent marketing campaign. Used to be that "The Cat in the Hat" brought to mind visions of charming illustrations and bizarrely catchy little rhymes. Now all I get is Mike Myers, fart jokes, garish visuals and a throbbing migraine. Thanks for draining me of a few sweet memories.You could rent three movies a night for the next 10 years and not come across one as crass and insulting as this one. It's a dungheap of monumental proportions, a posthumus slap in the face to a beloved author, and not much more than an 78-minute advertisement for Ford Motors and Universal Studios. Laughless, charmless, entirely without merit (except if you work for Universal, that is) and easily one of the worst movies of the past ten years, "The Cat in the Hat" is absolutely nothing more than a nauseating confluence of commerce, clamor and crap.
link directly to this review at http://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=8346&reviewer=128
originally posted: 11/24/03 15:11:17
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USA
21-Nov-2003 (PG)
DVD: 16-Mar-2004
UK
N/A
Australia
01-Apr-2004
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