- Contributed
From left, Spencer Bresln as Conrad, Mike Myers as The Cat and Dakota Fanning as Sally (with Nevins the Dog). At right, The Cat (Mike Myers) cleans up with the D.I.R.T. (Dynamic Industrial Renovating Tractormajigger) in The Cat in the Hat.
IF YOU really love your child you may want to take him to see The Cat in the Hat. The statement is made not because of any belief that it is a must see for children, but because of the harm the movie may have on the adult who accompanies the child.
While the very young, between the ages of 0 - 8 may easily find themselves charmed by a six foot, two inch cat, parents may find that they are tempted to chew their own legs off in order to escape from the boredom.
Director Bo Welch and screenwriters Alec Berg, David Mandel and Jeff Schaffer almost bring the famed Dr. Seuss tale to life. It breathes, it even manages to skip on a very rare occasion but The Cat in The Hat does little else.
In bringing this story to the big screen, the charm of reading the poetry to a young one at night was removed, but nothing was put back into it to make it palatable to anyone above age eight. The pictures have come to life, but the story has not.
Visually, The Cat in the Hat seemed to fit my very limited knowledge of the world of Dr. Seuss. Having never medled with neither grinches nor green eggs and ham its a largely unfamiliar world. Even so, the movie looked right.
The world created in the movie seems like the kind of place which could be narrated rhymes and where a giant cat could caper around. All the little houses look as though they are from the pages of a child's mind. Everything is perfect and in perfectly bright colours. While that level of lime green would probably send people insane in real life, it works in the movie.
The creation of characters is where The Cat in The Hat went wrong. Horribly wrong.
It is amazing that after taking us through the airhead shenanegans of Wayne's World, the British spy spoofs Austin Powers and turning the fairy tale world on its head in Shrek, Mike Myers plays such a hackneyed, uninteresting cat, striped hat or not.
The Cat does not even seem like a cat. Instead he looks like a man in a very well made cat suit (which for some reason has eyebrows worth killing for). Each time he makes that laugh, which sounds like a cross between one of the Austin Powers characters and a hair ball committing suicide, one is simply tempted to beat the hat off of him.
His jokes are for the most fall flat, even though it is obvious that the cat was intended to be the adult palatable portion of the flick. Most of the humour is targeted at the very young, and the few attempts at engaging wit only come close to the mark.
The children, Conrad (Spencer Breslin) and Sally Walden (Dakota Fanning) are as lifeless as cardboard cut-outs, well-painted cardboard cut-outs and their mother (Kelly Preston) is no different.
Alec Baldwin's stint as the bad guy, Lawrence Quinn, barely registers on the radar. The only character which came close to being interesting was the fish. Sean Hayes, who came to fame on Will and Grace with the catchy line "just Jack!" did a more than decent job as the very mobile Fish. The few moments worth chuckling over are all due to him. Hayes also doubles as Mr. Humberfloob, though this character is much less interesting.
The Cat in the Hat should have been kept in the bag. It's as fun as watching a cat spit up a furball. And unfortunately for you, he does that.
