Cats review: A 'rare and star-spangled calamity'

Taylor Swift as Bombalurina in a scene from Cats. Photo / AP

REVIEW: By Tim Robey

Pre-judging Cats based on the widely ridiculed trailers wouldn't be fair, especially once you realise they did it a lot of favours... they hid the big numbers; they silenced the singing; minimised were James Corden's wobbly pratfalls into piles of dead fish, Idris Elba's leering expressions and Ian McKellen's entire role as Gus the Theatre Cat.

Once seen, the only realistic way to fix Cats would be to spay it, or simply pretend it never happened. Because it's an all-time disaster - a rare and star-spangled calamity which will leave jaws littered across floors and agents unemployed. For the first time since the head-spinningly dire dadcom Old Dogs in 2010, I'm giving a film no stars.

Judi Dench as Old Deuteronomy. Photo / AP

At every turn, you imagine the panicked justifications. Andrew Lloyd Webber's stage musical ran for 21 years in the West End and has grossed $3.5 billion worldwide. Memory, sung by the depressed ex-glamour cat Grizabella, is a household favourite even your gran has covered. All of Tom Hooper's last three films have won Oscars, somehow, and doesn't the eclectic cast have something for everyone? It becomes a scramble to get out alive. What worked in the round off Drury Lane in 1981 - a suspension of disbelief, with the whole cast pirouetting in cat-suits - has been converted into a computer-aided hellscape so off-putting you may suspect eye failure.

Meanwhile, the Frankensteinian marriage of live performance, "digital fur technology" and human/cat anatomical splicing has such endlessly sinister impact that the film's U certificate ought to be an 18.

As it starts, a writhing pillowcase is flung into an alley off Piccadilly Circus, containing Victoria, an unwanted ingénue cat played by Francesca Hayward. From all around her, a chorus of disembodied faces, atrociously wedded to the efforts of the effects team, bear down; already, we know we're in deep, deep trouble.

Jokes don't save us, since Lee Hall's script tries every cat idiom in the OED to find a funny one. Plot, too, can't come to the rescue, because T S Eliot's source poems didn't provide one. As each cameo performance comes and goes, the mind boggles at which of them - according to judging matriarch Old Deuteronomy (a deeply earnest, inescapably hilarious Judi Dench) - could possibly be deemed top cat.

Jason Derulo as Rum Tum Tugger. Photo / AP

Jennyanydots is a lazy house tabby in the desperate, crotch-scratching shape of Rebel Wilson. Her big number has mice in a doll-house with human faces, and cockroaches in march formation, one of which she gobbles down in mad close-up. It might be the ugliest big-screen musical sequence ever mounted.

But let's not count our chickens quite yet. In come Jason Derulo as a sleazy playa called Rum Tum Tugger, and Corden's greedy-guts Bustopher Jones, neither carrying a tune to speak of, and both made to get furrily naked. McKellen, meanwhile, is caught lapping backstage from a dish. Grizabella (Jennifer Hudson) traipses about in shadow, shawled in what look like the remains of four other dead cats' pelts.

An hour and a quarter in, I wondered if Taylor Swift had forced her management to yank her out of the edit. But no. She drops by on a suspended moon and is gone in the space of a song - Macavity - which comes closer than anything before it to genuinely working.

Ian McKellen as Gus the Theatre Cat. Photo / AP

Swift is catlike and can sing, which - guess what? - turns out to be attributes helpful in a Cats musical.

If we pretended this bit was her weirdest ever pop video, and ignored Elba's Macavity - sashaying in with shiny chocolate fur for the worst shots of his life - we might just about live with it.

Finding any high point in Cats, though, takes some serious scratching.