Mr. Fuzzy Pants
STARRING: Kevin Spacey, Jennifer Garner, Christopher Walken, Robbie Amell.
DIRECTOR: Barry Sonnenfeld
Genre: Comedy
Rating: PG
87 mins
THIS movie is nothing short of a catastrophe. Feline jokes aside, cat-lovers are warned to stay away for the fear of losing all affection for their precious pets. And, for those who have always been ambiguous towards the cat population, this movie was practically made to convince you to drop all hopes of ever looking at a cat without thinking of this movie and running away.
Kevin Spacey plays Tom Brand, a billionaire real-estate tycoon with a few startling similarities to a certain US political figure, who is a workaholic and all around bad father and husband to his daughter (Malina Weissman) and wife (Jessica Garner).
After missing his 11-year old daughter’s birthday he decides to get her the present she has always wanted and he has always despised … a pet cat.
However, he ends up at a magical pet emporium and after falling from a window with his cat during a lightning storm, Tom Brand’s brain ends up in the cat, while his body is left in a coma. And, of course, as a cat he must win back the love of his family, while also saving his business from the corporate vultures.
Mr. Fuzzypants finds a new way of joining all the 1980s/90s movie gimmicks of talking animals, body-swapping and workaholic-dads into one super cliché.
The humour is mainly centred on slapstick and slow-motion scenes, but there is nothing to really get you laughing anywhere-else during the movie.
Despite starring two Oscar-winners, Kevin Spacey and Christopher Walken, the movie doesn’t seem to register one scene where any of the characters connect. Perhaps it’s because after Spacey’s body is rolled off, only 20 minutes into the show, he is left only as a voice-over of the thoughts he has in Mr. Fuzzypants’ body.
What makes it worse is that the voice-over often doesn’t sync with the cat at all, even when it’s meowing, and it might as well be the actor standing in the cinema shouting out his lines. The technical issues continue with the jarring and honestly horrifying use of CGI with the cat, which looks less like a cat and more like a set-piece stolen from The Conjuring.
However, the movie does slightly benefit from being strangely dark and cynical undertones surrounding its slapstick sessions. The same murderous angst that Kevin Spacey funnels in his role as Frank Underwood in a House of Cards is on display here, with an odd but fascinating contrast between the sweet, defenceless cat and the harsh undertones of Tom Brand’s thoughts and the darkness of the outside world: threat of financial ruin, divorce and death.
These moments stretch the PG rating, with the cat doing the unmentionable in his first wife’s handbag, swallowing a 50-year old beverage, and someone potentially finding life unbearable during the climax of the movie.
If someone had decided to turn YouTube’s entire cat memes into a movie, the result would probably still be better than Mr. Fuzzy Pants.
Showing in: Novo Cinemas, Cineco, Seef II, Dana Cineplex
Rating: 2/5
