Peter Debruge, Variety"To assess Cats as good or bad feels like the entirely wrong axis on which to see it. It is, with all affection, a monstrosity."
Hannah Woodhead, Little White Lies"Nine may not be enough lives for some of the stars to live down their involvement in this poorly conceived and executed adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s hit musical."
Tyler Burr, Boston Globe"I felt the light inside me slowly fading."
David Sexton, London Evening Standard"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."
"Nearly as obscene as The Human Centipede…It all just feels so wrong. Whether they are human or feline, what on earth has happened in those smoothed out groins, so much exposed by the leotards? And let’s not think about those tails that keep erecting for emphasis. All of the characters appear much more to advantage when dressed in clothes (whatever the logic of that)."
Eric Kohn, Indiewire"The setting is London, it does look post-nuclear. There aren’t any people, so maybe there were Bomb blasts—or maybe a bio disaster, causing cat-human mutants with digital fur."
Justin Chang, Los Angeles Times"Overall, however, it’s a spectacular paradox of a movie—at once too crazy for this world and not quite crazy enough"
David Rooney, The Hollywood Reporter"With its grotesque design choices and busy, metronomic editing, “Cats” is as uneasy on the eyes as a Hollywood spectacle can be, tumbling into an uncanny valley between mangy realism and dystopian artifice. But then again, maybe this look was the appropriate choice for a movie in which making sense was the very last priority. At some point during “Cats”—I think I was trying to distract myself from the richly metaphorical image of James Corden sifting through garbage—it occurred to me that only one letter separates its title from Pixar’s “Cars,” to name another hermetically sealed, digitally polished, heavily anthropomorphized family-friendly entertainment set in a world from which actual human beings are creepily, apocalyptically absent."
"Derulo makes the most of his sexy, athletic appearance; Swift sparkles in her one-song role, descending from a smashed skylight on a theatrical crescent moon, sprinkling catnip; and Laurie Davidson as "The Magical Mr. Mistoffelees" gets the kind of bells-and-whistles showstopper that should make young kids perk up. I found it all exhausting."
Nate Adams, The Only Critic"An eclectic roster of stars claw out a few meager moments, but as screen experiences go, this is a memory best forgotten. To be fair, the challenge facing director/co-writer Tom Hooper ("Les Miserables") was perhaps insurmountable, to the extent that Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical has always been more about spectacle and the theatrical experience than story. The near-absence of a plot might work well enough in a live context, but in a movie, it's an awfully tedious way to spend time for those with only one life."
To be fair, they’re not all brutal pans. Us Weekly’s Mara Reinstein said the film was “not as bad as expected,” while the Arizona Republic’s Kerry Lengel wrote, “I didn’t hate it.” While neither are exactly glowing reviews at this point Cats should take what it can get."Congratulations to dogs."