Talk a few main furball. 20 years in the past, Mike Myers went full feline in Dr. Seuss‘ The Cat within the Hat, a live-action adaptation of Theodor Geisel’s still-beloved 1957 youngsters’s ebook. At the time, the previous Saturday Night Live participant was one of many largest film stars round, juggling two franchise behemoths — New Line’s Austin Powers trilogy and DreamWorks’s Shrek collection. After his fellow Canadian-born comedian A-lister Jim Carrey raked within the inexperienced for his starring position in How the Grinch Stole Christmas, it solely made sense for Myers to attempt his luck at headlining one of many good physician’s tales.
And he definitely suffered for his artwork. Buried below layers of angora and hair taken from people — not cats — Myers needed to resort to an in-costume cooling system to remain chill between takes. Tempers ran sizzling on the set as properly. Speaking with The A.V. Club in 2016, Cat within the Hat supporting participant Amy Hill referred to as the shoot a “nightmarish expertise” due largely to Myers’s working strategies and excessive isolation from the remainder of the solid and crew. “He would are available and, I assume, be in hair and make-up,” Hill recalled. “I’d be there on the daybreak, ready. We would all be ready for Mike Myers to return.”
As the saying goes, curiosity killed this cat. Released on Nov. 21, 2003, The Cat within the Hat was acquired extra like a horror film than a household comedy. Critics used phrases like “repulsive” and “ugly” of their myriad pans — the movie holds a ten% rating on Rotten Tomatoes — and audiences had been equally rubbed the mistaken manner primarily based on the B-minus CinemaScore. While the film did finally eke out $133 million worldwide, that was lower than half of the Grinch’s $385 million international gross.
Fortunately, Myers nonetheless had Shrek in his nook, however The Cat within the Hat put his live-action profession on paws… uh, pause. Five years would elapse earlier than he was the principle attraction in one other non-animated function movie, 2008’s equally disastrous The Love Guru. That one-two punch appeared to successfully finish his profession as a number one man; whereas Myers has popped up in every thing from Inglourious Basterds to Bohemian Rhapsody — and had his personal short-lived Netflix collection, 2022’s The Pentaverate — it has been 15 years since he is had a starring position in a serious movement image
Two many years later, although, is The Cat within the Hat actually as unhealthy as all that? We ran again the movie that claimed considered one of Mike Myers’s 9 lives and assembled this listing of professionals and cons… properly, principally cons.
PRO: It’s brief — very brief
In ebook type, The Cat within the Hat runs a trim 61 pages. In bringing the film to the display screen, director Bo Welch and the trio of credited screenwriters — Silicon Valley‘s Alec Berg, Veep‘s Dave Mandel and Curb Your Enthusiasm‘s Jeff Schaffer — correctly opted for brevity, holding the film at an ultra-brief 75 minutes, or 82 with credit. That’s a full 40 minutes shorter than Carrey’s live-action Grinch image, which wears out its welcome after the primary half-hour. You’ll be bored with Cat within the Hat about 20 minutes in, however the excellent news is that you will solely have an hour to go.
Con: It’s creepy — very creepy
Before stepping behind the digital camera to direct The Cat within the Hat, Welch bought his begin manufacturing designer on a formative trio of Tim Burton photos: Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands and Batman Returns. Those movies are the poster youngsters for “good creepy” — motion pictures that site visitors at nighttime and macabre, however all the time with a full coronary heart and clear-eyed sense of tone. The Cat within the Hat falls within the “unhealthy creepy” camp, the place the intention behind each artistic selection appears whimsical and enjoyable, however the finish result’s strained and unnerving. Case in level: Thing 1 and Thing 2, the cat’s troublemaking friends whose stiff, unmoving faces are pure nightmare gasoline. And then there are the cringey-creepy gags about plumber’s cracks and the Cat’s attraction to Kelly Preston and Paris Hilton that really feel like stray outtakes from the R-rated model of the script.
Pro: Dakota and Spencer do their greatest…
Spencer Breslin and Dakota Fanning had been 11 and 9, respectively, after they had been shoved onto a collection of soundstages populated by day-glo colours and a cat-suited Myers. That’s an amazing setting for even probably the most well-adjusted children and the duo admirably maintain stage heads amid the visible and verbal chaos. For probably the most half, they’re merely tasked with reacting to Myers doing his schtick, and since all three are solely often in the identical shot collectively, there is a sturdy probability that they filmed mentioned response pictures whereas their co-star was busy within the make-up trailer. Now that they are grown up, Breslin and Fanning may be embarrassed about having been on this film… however they do not must be embarrassed about their performances within the film.
Con: But Mike Myers overwhelms them — and every thing else
Comedy is all about making large decisions, and there is no query that Myers’s efficiency as Dr. Seuss’s furry feline flibbertigibbet is bigger than life. Mixing a distinctly Mel Brooks-ian Borscht Belt vocal patter along with his trademark Austin Powers face-scrunching, the actor makes himself the focal point from the second he enters the movie, pulling focus from the opposite actors, the lavish units and the hardly there story. That’s what he was employed to do, after all, however his relentless demand for the viewer’s consideration exhausts quite than entertains. Myers spends a lot of the transfer lifeless heart within the body performing on to the digital camera and blocking out almost every thing else round him. Even in the event you needed to look someplace else… you’ll be able to’t.
Pro and Con: It killed off live-action Dr. Seuss motion pictures
To quote her late husband’s personal phrases, when Dr. Seuss’s widow, Audrey Geisel, noticed The Cat within the Hat, she didn’t prefer it. Not one little bit. And, for the file, she had been towards Myers’s casting from the beginning. “I by no means noticed Austin Powers, however I knew ‘Yeah, child!’ and I did not need ‘Yeah, child!’ in any respect,” she told Today in 2004. Audrey Geisel — who died in 2018 — promptly declared Dr. Seuss off-limits for live-action variations, leading to books like Horton Hears a Who! and The Lorax going the animated route as an alternative. That’s most likely for the very best primarily based on how The Cat within the Hat turned out, however 20 years later, it looks like we’re overdue for one more try. Just think about Greta Gerwig’s Bartholomew and the Oobleck. Or Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogen riffing on “Too Many Daves.” And with James Cameron off exploring the oceans of Pandora, Christopher Nolan may take a deep dive into McElligot’s Pool.
The Cat within the Hat is presently streaming on Peacock.
