Rating: ?
Despite my love of film, I find it incredibly difficult to find joy in watching bad films. Whether it be because I’m boring or because I’ve been spoilt by the filmmaking proficiency of the Stanley Kubrick’s and Charlie Kaufman’s of the world; when I’m met with inconsistent tones, bland characters and dull stories, I am typically left either bored or annoyed. For example when watching famous ‘so bad that its good film’ Troll 2 (1990), besides the meme scenes I found it a pretty unrewarding watch. In The Cat in the Hat, the rule breaking Conrad and control freak Sally are too simplistic to be interesting and the obvious signalling of Conrad and his mom’s (who gives a terrible performance) relationship arc doesn’t leave much up to interpretation. To those who would object and say ‘it doesn’t matter about the film’s arc and characters being simplistic because it’s a children’s film’, I’d love to hear their explanation for the addition of the nightmare fuelling monsters Thing 1 and Thing 2, in this film supposedly made for ‘babies’. The film’s set design comes off as both playful and sterile where the use of bold colours contribute to a blocky and bland look. And the inclusion of one of the most eye rolling clichés best left in the 00s comes up, with the reaction shot from the family dog Nevins covering his face in response to the Cat’s high-jinx. However I kind of love this film.
I fully admit my enjoyment of this film comes from an ironic place, I think the two biggest factors that contribute to this are the film having a budget of $109 million and it’s unhinged script. This is a ridiculous amount of money given how little of it is seen on the screen, but presumably it allows for the multitude of different costumes, extras, props and set dressings required for each and every joke. This is a prime example of maximalist filmmaking as it doesn’t give you a second to adjust to what it’s showing you before moving on to the next thing. The jokes are pretty inappropriate for kids, mind you it’s not the more adult/sexual jokes scattered throughout the film (they’re hilarious given how out of place they are in a Cat in the Hat film), but just the weirdly specific but also incredibly vague possible pop cultural jokes. Early on we see a fight on TV occurring in Taiwanese parliament; I looked it up and apparently The Taiwanese Legislative Yuan is notable for a high number of violent outbursts, but did the screenwriters expect the average Cat in the Hat viewer to be aware of this? I know I wasn’t. Then later, Cat stars and guests in a made up cooking TV show, set and all, after Sally haphazardly suggests they make cupcakes; the Cat host is an overly friendly American where the Cat guest has a pronounced Northern English accent and keeps on shouting the phrase ’I’m so excited’. What is this in reference to? Who knows. The point is its dumb, inappropriate for a kids film, more often then not falls flat comedically and cost a couple of suckers over $100 million dollars and that is hilarious. In all fairness this film earned back over $130 million so maybe the real suckers were the audience.
Many have complained that the Cat looks scary, similar to how I have spoke of Thing 1 and 2, but even as a kid he never bothered me, especially compared to the Grinch from the 2000 film who I find way more frightening. But this is obviously a very subjective area, so I imagine it can highly vary from person to person. Maybe my growing up with the film is part of the reason for my enjoyment of it; Smash Mouth’s cover of ‘Getting Better’ brings with it the cheesy charm from the 2000s that you don’t really see any more. An additional aspect of this film that makes it difficult for me to hate it, is how unrelenting it is. The most gruelling part of the film is the short time at the beginning before the Cat is present, but when he appears, it is non-stop. I’ve heard some liken its pace to a surrealist fever dream but I guess I can just detach myself from the experience of watching the film and can happily view it on a meta level as a spectacularly unsuccessful (in terms of its comedy and lack of appeal to its child audience) attempt at adapting The Cat in the Hat. Usually I would give a film like this a pretty bad rating, but for me this is one of a kind in how entertainingly unsuccessful it is compared to other popular ‘so bad they’re good’ films that seem more scattered in their entertainment value. And for those reasons I am giving The Cat in the Hat 5 stars out of 5.
