Cats
Universal Pictures | Release Date: December 20, 2019 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
32
METASCORE
Generally unfavorable reviews based on 51 Critic Reviews
Positive:
6
Mixed:
23
Negative:
22
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
38
The Seattle TimesMoira MacdonaldDec 18, 2019
“Cats” the movie is deeply, deeply weird, and not in a good way. Read full review
38
Chicago Sun-TimesRichard RoeperDec 18, 2019
Cats is a slick and tedious and weird-looking exercise in self-indulgence. Read full review
35
CNNBrian LowryDec 18, 2019
Cats isn't quite the unmitigated disaster that some feared -- or perversely hoped -- but it's not good, delivering a mostly incoherent adaptation of the long-running musical. An eclectic roster of stars claw out a few meager moments, but as screen experiences go, this is a memory best forgotten. Read full review
33
The A.V. ClubIgnatiy VishnevetskyDec 18, 2019
Of course, Cats has always been ridiculous, just as it has always been ridiculed. (“Cats is a dog,” declared a notorious review of the musical’s Broadway debut.) But Hooper can’t even get camp right. Read full review
33
ConsequenceDominick Suzanne-MayerDec 18, 2019
As an adaptation, Cats is declawed, never delving fully into the possibilities offered by its proportion-manipulating trick photography and its animated cast. As a big-budget spectacle, it’s a triumphant disaster, if one at least born from a unique idea. Read full review
30
The New YorkerRichard BrodyJan 22, 2020
These basic failures of taste and sensibility are a subset of Hooper’s over-all failure of literal vision: he doesn’t really see what he’s doing, and the virtual invisibility of his own movie to himself is reflected in an odd set of metaphors that result from his casting. Read full review
30
Los Angeles TimesJustin ChangDec 18, 2019
For the most part, Cats is both a horror and an endurance test, a dispatch from some neon-drenched netherworld where the ghastly is inextricable from the tedious. Every so often it does paws — ahem, pause — to rise to the level of a self-aware hoot. Read full review
30
VarietyPeter DebrugeDec 18, 2019
Tom Hooper’s outlandishly tacky interpretation seems destined to become one of those once-in-a-blue-moon embarrassments that mars the résumés of great actors (poor Idris Elba, already scarred enough as the villainous Macavity) and trips up the careers of promising newcomers (like ballerina Francesca Hayward, whose wide-eyed, mouth-agape Victoria displays one expression for the entire movie). Read full review
30
Austin ChronicleBeth SullivanDec 18, 2019
Here’s the thing, though: Cats still makes no f.cking sense. Read full review
30
The Hollywood ReporterDavid RooneyDec 18, 2019
It's almost unfathomable that this one made it through all the preliminary production meetings without someone sensibly calling a halt to the process by saying, "Wait a minute, those kitties are damn creepy!" Read full review
30
TheWrapRobert AbeleDec 18, 2019
Tom Hooper’s jarring fever dream of a spectacle is like something that escaped from Dr. Moreau’s creature laboratory instead of a poet’s and a composer’s feline (uni)verse, an un-catty valley hybrid of physical and digital that unsettles and crashes way more often than it enchants. Read full review
25
New York PostJohnny OleksinskiDec 18, 2019
Please wipe this movie from my “Memory.” Read full review
20
The Observer (UK)Simran HansDec 23, 2019
The camera’s canted angles and shaky closeups convulse with feeling that the actors can’t seem to summon. Ensemble dance sequences convey neither emotion nor information (except that the felines each have 10 fully articulated human toes). The film is rated U, but many of its uncanny images are sure to haunt viewers for generations. Read full review
20
Wall Street JournalJohn AndersonDec 19, 2019
Mostly, Cats is a confusing litter box of intentions, from its crushed-velour aesthetic to its strip-bar sensuality to its musical cluelessness. Read full review
20
The GuardianPeter BradshawDec 18, 2019
It’s warbling warbling warbling piffle. Read full review
12
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Chandler LevackDec 20, 2019
It is the best anti-cat propaganda in the world. It could make you hate Garfield. Because the biggest sin of Cats, other than all its writhing sexuality and the heinous hairball filmmaking, is that it is supremely boring. Read full review
12
Boston GlobeTy BurrDec 18, 2019
I truly believe our divided nation can be healed and brought together as one by Cats — the musical, the movie, the disaster. In other news, my eyes are burning. Oh God, my eyes. Read full review
12
Slant MagazineJake ColeDec 18, 2019
This adaptation gets straight to the heart of the material, which is basically two hours of stray cats introducing themselves. Read full review
0
Rolling StonePeter TraversDec 20, 2019
Attention, moviegoers searching for the worst movie of the year: We have a late-breaking winner. Cats slips in right under the radar and easily scores as the bottom of the 2019 barrel — and arguably of the decade. Even Michael Bay’s trash trilogy of soul-destroying Transformers movies can’t hold a candle. What happened? Read full review
0
The PlaylistLena WilsonDec 18, 2019
The problem is not that Cats makes no sense . . . nor that the performances are mediocre (most of them are quite good). The murder weapon is the galling CGI intended to cover the actors in head-to-toe feline fur. Instead, the animation detracts from the film’s capable performers and inventive surroundings, drawing the eye reluctantly in like the sight of a person vomiting in the middle of an amusement park. It makes for a slow death, so overwhelmingly grotesque that it ceases to be interesting at all. Read full review
0
The TelegraphTim RobeyDec 18, 2019
The only realistic way to fix Cats would be to spay it, or simply pretend it never happened. Because it's an all-time - a rare and star-spangled calamity. Read full review
0
Chicago TribuneMichael PhillipsDec 18, 2019
Is it the worst film of 2019, or simply the most recent misfire of 2019? Reader, I swear on a stack of pancakes: “Cats” cannot be beat for sheer folly and misjudgment and audience-reaction-to-“Springtime for Hitler”-in-“The Producers” stupefaction. Read full review
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