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Movie Forums :: Reviews :: The Cat in the Hat Falls Flat |
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Posted on 12/16/03
The Cat in the Hat Falls Flat
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It's unfortunate that movie studios determine the success of a film by how much money it makes at the box office, even though the film may not have been considered very good by most critics. The reason this is unfortunate is because the box office success of Ron Howard's The Grinch Who Stole Christmas, starring Jim Carrey (2000), is probably the reason we're suffering through another poor adaptation of a wonderful Dr. Seuss classic: The Cat in the Hat.
What makes The Cat in the Hat bad? Certainly it couldn't be the flat performance by the normally hilarious Mike Myers, could it? I actually felt embarrassed for him as he delivered lines and antics in which my fellow audience members repeatedly failed to respond. At one point, after a punch line, I swear I thought I heard a cricket in the theater.
"Mom," played by the tightly dressed Kelly Preston, is hosting a party that evening for her germ-fearing boss (Sean Hayes). The children, Sally and Conrad (Dakota Fanning and Spencer Breslin, respectively), are left with explicit instructions from Mom to keep the house clean while she is at work. The rain comes, the kids are bored, and here comes the Cat in the Hat. A few messes here, a little panic there. Thing One, Thing Two, a talking fish with common sense, and a quick clean-up before Mom gets home completes the story. Sounds like the book, doesn't it?
Oh, I forgot to mention the two-faced neighbor, Quinn, (Alec Baldwin), who wants to marry Mom but can't stand Conrad. I also forgot to mention that the box Thing One and Thing Two came out of is locked because of "dangerous and messy reasons." Of course, Conrad takes the lock off and the dog runs off with it. Now the film proceeds to be a "get-the-dog-and-the-lock-before-the box-unleashes-its-wrath" type film. Quinn ends up with the dog, and the children and Cat chase him all over town.
The chase includes the passing through of an underground rave (literally), where a cameo by Paris Hilton capturing the Cat's attention gets little of ours. When they all get home, the box has unleashed its wrath on the house in the form of a twisted transformation (as if Tim Burton designed the set on acid)! After taking a roller-coaster type car through the house to find the box, the lock is put in place, and the house returns to "normal" (yet demolished).
Despite the flat performance by Myers, I'd have to say the most overwhelming factor in making this film bad is the adaptation. I understand the difficulty of creating a feature length film out of a rhyming picture book, but that's a lesson the studio should have learned after Grinch.
Pretty bad, huh? I can only imagine what the studios would do with Green Eggs and Ham, Hop on Pop, and Horton Hears a Who.
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