Dir. Bo Welch, 2003, USA, 82 mins
Cast: Mike Myers, Kelly Preston, Alec Baldwin, Sean Hayes
Belatedly following the success of Ron Howard's adaptation of How The Grinch Stole Christmas, The Cat in the Hat marks the directorial debut of production designer Bo Welch. Despite receiving almost uniformly poor reviews in the USA, the film has proved to be a huge box office hit there, taking over $100 million on its release last Christmas.
When naughty Conrad (Spenser Breslin) is left at home with his precocious sister Sally (Dakota Fanning) and told by his mom (Preston) to behave, it seems like a reasonable request. When a giant cat appears, promising fun and mayhem they soon forget their responsibility to keep the house in order for mom's party. Can they persuade the Cat to help before they both get sent off to the dreaded military school by mom's two faced boyfriend (Baldwin)?
The title is a misnomer, cynically designed to confuse its potential audience. This is not Dr Seuss' Cat In The Hat, it is clearly Mike Myers' show and one that holds none of the timeless appeal of the original and much loved text. Myers' Cat is like an unfunny cousin of Jim Carrey's The Mask; crude, boorish and, despite the film's brief running time, long outstays his welcome.
The film has an obsessive desire to be hip by using slang, innuendo and, in a number of cases, nearly descending into profanity. This is hideously out of place in a kids film and horribly wrong in a film adaptation of a book intended to promote literacy. I doubt Dr Seuss would have been very happy that a product with his name on it features a scene in which a boy is taught how to spell the word 'shit'.
A plethora of unfunny scatological gags pepper the film in a desperate attempt to appeal on a base level. Needless to say they fail, insulting the audience young and old and sinking the film even further into the mire.
There are a small number of briefly amusing gags. A parody of American cookery shows raises a laugh as does a scene in which a boy (who is so odd looking he must be computer generated) wallops the Cat with a baseball bat, prompting an amusing sight gag. However, neither of these jokes are aimed at kids and are likely to wash right over their heads.
The film springs to life with the bizarre pixie-like Thing 1 and Thing 2. With their slightly disturbing permanent grins and plastic visages these two creatures dash around the house causing mayhem and chaos, but this kind of charm is a rarity in the film. The general rule is that loud is funny.
The performances range from the bland (Preston) to the ridiculous (Baldwin). The children are fine but Myers' constant mugging while making witless asides to the audience grates within seconds of his first appearance.
The production design, while stunning for the first ten minutes soon becomes wearing on the eye. Although using primary colours is a nice touch, there is little to separate this world from the Cat's world of magic. A brief sequence in which the characters race around a water slide seems to exist only for Myers to break a wall and remind the audience to visit Universal Studios in a piece of direct and cynical advertising masquerading as knowing humour.
Most of the success that the film has enjoyed in the USA can surely be attributed to having the well known Dr Seuss name on the poster; however any adults thinking of taking children to this film would be far better off buying them one of Dr Seuss' remarkable original books.
Jonathan Wilkins
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