Review by Stephen Tronicek
NINE LIVES is offensive on an intellectual level, which is kind of clichéd to say, but it’s resoundingly true. It’s only understanding of a film for kids is to pander to them. Now, sometimes a pandering attitude of an exaggerated happiness in the world is a good thing in a kids film. It’s what makes the lows of those films seem low, and the highs seem so high, but there’s a difference between taking the real world and filtering all the tougher emotions that it presents through a happier lens, and simply making everything happy and fake as you can be for the sake of appeasing the children. The latter just seems disrespectful. That, of course, doesn’t stop NINE LIVES from pulling the worst version of that ever, especially since this tone doesn’t actually work with the rest of the movie.
As for the plot, Kevin Spacey stars as Thomas Brand, a man who ignores his family and when his daughter’s birthday comes up decides he must grudgingly get her a cat. Christopher Walken plays the owner of the store and he decides that Brand, being such an ignorant person, needs to be taught a lesson. So, Walken puts Brand’s consciousness in a cat, “comedy” ensues, and Brand must save the company and skyscraper that he built while being a cat.
The premise is trivial, but the real insult here is the world that NINE LIVES creates. The pandering sense of everything being so nice doesn’t actually work well with the characters, who all but undercut the main conflict of the movie. Brand is an idiot, and a horrible father, but everyone here is. Each character is so thoroughly unlikable that Brand simply comes off as one of the many people who deserve to get some sense tortured into them. And tortured it is. The whole way that each person is turned into a cat is something out of a horror movie. Actually, this movie deserves a horror movie version. That would at least be watchable.
But, the focus here is less on any of the plot or scary cat transformations. The real focus is the number of early 2000’s slapstick jokes having to do with cats that can be crammed on screen. It’s like the film thinks that the Garfield movie is still relevant and funny, and much like the characters of the film, most of the jokes approach the level of just being mean rather than funny. This kids movie makes a joke about someone bringing an uzi to an office building, and makes a joke at the expense of child labor.. This is unacceptable for this movie, and just uncomfortable.
NINE LIVES is the type of film that makes one with it had more fangs. With an “R” rating and a right to give into the more horror-ish aspects of its premise, Nine Lives would be a weird type of incredible, but now it just seems like it’s either too nice for the mean-spirited characters at its center or to mean for the niceties that the world of the film compromises to take. This is a sickening piece of work (quite literally), and you should skip it.
0 of 5 Stars
