That Fish really shtupped the Landlady, Huh?
Some jokes go over kids’ heads. Others lacerate their eyelids.
There isn’t much to find funny in this animated reboot of The Cat in the Hat. It’s not that the jokes fall flat. It’s that there really aren’t that many jokes. It never feels like it’s trying to be particularly funny.
It’s barely trying to stay alive.
My first introduction to the works of Ted Geisel came at the doctor’s office when I was very young. Fitting, as this started to feel like a trip to the doctor’s office after about the first forty-five minutes.
Why the hell is it nearly two hours long?
It has no stated purpose for existing. I don’t quite understand where The Cat works. It’s not explained. And it doesn’t appear to be a job or career, but his entire existence. We don’t ever see him clock out and go home. He finishes one assignment, then it’s on to the next.
There are a bunch of anomalies that work around or beside him. Like Giraffe with a Carafe and Pig in a Wig. But they don’t appear to be doing the same tasks. None of it is ever explained. We’re just expected to go with it.
I didn’t want to. It bothered me.
The whole setup is basement-level Pixar. It holds shades of Monsters, Inc. mixed with Bedknobs and Broomsticks. Just with none of the inventive imagination that made those special.
The Cat in the Hat jukes like something that was quickly cobbled together from several bullet points sold at an animation seminar. Though devoid of any type of emotional weight or meaning.
The humans are the typical noncommittal beige flavor of generic. There’s the requisite single mom in her lampshade-shaped body that immediately tells us she’s a “mom” without lifting a finger. The youngest son is merely a smudge. The older daughter is mad that she’s moved to a new town. It’s off-brand soda with a carbonation leak.
The Cat, who’s on the verge of being fired from whatever the hell it is he does, is sent to cheer the daughter up.
At first, it looks like we’re about to get a time travel adventure. The Cat has a device that rewinds life, and the girl wants to use it to repair her miserable existence. It’s called The Go-Backer. And I doubt Dr. Seuss himself would have come up with such a dumb, uninspired name for the wonky thing.
The pocket watch-like gizmo travels backwards at an irritating pace that’s incredibly hard to watch. I dreaded what was to come next. But then the plot flings itself in a right weird direction. And not in a better way.
Instead of the kids blasting back to the recent past as suggested, The Cat loses his little clock gadget, and must go searching for it in a bunch of moving boxes.
That’s literally the rest of the movie. Them exploring the contents of three different U-Haul boxes. How did they turn a thin pages book into a beefy two-hour canned food drive? This is how. It’s a daggy, draggy, blaggy nap-inducing cartoon of shrill immobility.
It’s also mostly about Thing 2 becoming a demonic cat-hungry creature who is obsessed with time. Why does Thing 2 want so desperately to live in the past, so much so that it destroys him and transforms him into a hideous beast?
The movie doesn’t know, and doesn’t expect you to care. That’s pretty much its thesis statement for the duration.
This is the ultimate mope interrupter for miserable dopes.
Skip The Cat in the Hat this weekend, and go watch The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T. instead.
For anyone interested, there is an end-credits scene where they rewind through the entire movie, then threaten to play it all over again.
God, no! This thing is worse than the live-action version with Michael Myers. At least it’s only 79 minutes long.
