“The disapproval seems to be universal”: The worst movie Ian McKellen will ever make
About six years ago, there was a terrible event that took place, which caused a wave of anguish around the globe. People were so affected that they were forced to stay indoors for weeks on end, others reported sickness and nausea, while thousands more were traumatised by the images they were seeing on screens in front of them. The world would never quite be the same again. I am, of course, talking about the movie Cats starring James Corden and Ian McKellen.
The warning signs were there; a trailer featuring a slowed-down version of a popular song, all kinds of dodgy CGI, a distinctly creepy ‘I just wandered into a furry convention’ feel to the whole thing, in addition to lots of theatre kid ‘eager eyes and teeth’ plus the sight of the ‘Corden cat’ dancing about in a top hat and laughing manically like he did on his chat show. It’s an absolutely horrific mess, and all copies of it should have been put in a wardrobe with heavy rocks and set on fire and pushed off a cliff into the sea.
But of course it wasn’t, they released the full version of the thing, and every actor involved in it, Taylor Swift, Jennifer Hudson, Judi Dench (for shame), Idris Elba, they all carry a heavy responsibility, and if they didn’t donate their salaries to charity or at least to a cat sanctuary, then they should have done. McKellen, for his part, seems to be of the opinion that it’s ok for it to be as bad as it is, for the sole reason that the theatre production was worse, which makes you wonder why someone of his calibre signed up in the first place.
Two-time Academy Award-nominated McKellen plays ‘Gus the theatre cat’ in the adaptation based on the early 1980s Broadway show by Andrew Lloyd Webber, and a few years later, he reflected on it to Attitude, saying: “If you think the film got bad reviews, you should have seen the reviews for the stage show! When critics are clearly at odds with the public… A show you know the public are enjoying, or would enjoy, is killed by some negative reaction… In the case of Cats, the disapproval seems to be universal.”
And with very good reason, because it’s a complete nightmare, a computerised, all-singing, all-dancing representation of what happens when celebrities get so famous that they completely lose touch with all sense of normalcy, of what is a good idea and what isn’t, and surround themselves by yes people who constantly tell them how brilliant they are.
When it was released in 2019, Cats was quite correctly panned by everyone who was unfortunate to have to sit through it. Even the CGI glitched and at one point clearly showed Dench’s human hand with a wedding ring on it rather than a paw. Reviews variously used terms like ‘exhausting’ and ‘mangy’ and ‘a dreadful hairball of woe’. The only two people to come out of it with any credit were Anne Hathaway and Hugh Jackman, who both turned down appearing in it in the first place.
Perhaps the most succinct summing up of the movie came from Ricky Gervais hosting the Golden Globes the following year, who said simply that the movie was “The worst thing to happen to cats since dogs.”
