I knew this wasn't going to be good going into it, but I was hoping/expecting it would be the fun kind of bad like The Room or Sharknado. All of the promotional material and post-release press painted a picture of this being cinema's next big trashterpiece. While I can see it fitting that bill for some, I personally found it to be too aggressively awful to deliver the kind of ironic entertainment I was looking for. I had no idea what was going on for the first half of the movie. It's just a string of inconsequential characters being introduced through musical numbers, all but one of which are unintelligible, and not just lyrically. Everybody onscreen does have a powerful voice, but not one of them seems to be able to enunciate. I'm not sure if it's a problem with the audio mixing or what, but I've heard more vocal clarity from mumble rappers. That's a big nail in the coffin for a musical like this. A plot centered around reincarnation does eventually emerge from all the nonsense. However, that's when the movie goes from being stupefyingly terrible to a total snoozefest. I legitimately struggled to stay awake and came dangerously close to turning the thing off. It was only by sheer willpower and the fact that I had already given up halfway through another film earlier this month that I was able to keep going. The ending is sweet in a sappy sort of way, but nothing leading up to it is interesting. The CGI cat people are, of course, horrifying. The opening sequence looks like something out of a horror flick and these are the most terrifying dance routines this side of the Suspiria remake. Just when you think things can't get any more disturbing there's some horrific new sight waiting around the next corner, be it the nightmarish rat children or Idris Elba's disgusting unfinished pelt (between this and his old man look in Thor: Ragnarok I no longer find him attractive). Why do they all have human hands? It's also weirdly sexual. As if Tom Hooper made this for his own enjoyment if you know what I mean. This is especially strange because it appears, at least to me, that the material would have done better had it been aimed at children. Yet, at the end of the day Cats is too inappropriate for the audience it seems most suited for. Only time will tell if this becomes a cult classic the likes of Birdemic or Troll 2. It seemingly has all the right elements as it's very existence is kind of hilarious. The problem for me was that those laughs weren't found while actually watching the movie. It's far more amusing from the outside because you don't really have to experience how overly long, boring, and uncomfortable it is to sit through. So given how the aforementioned titles have managed to find followings despite their lack of quality because of how much fun they are in the moment with the right mindset, this will always just be little more than a particularly foul turd in the litter box from my viewpoint.