Kevin Spacey is like a piece of possessed taxidermy

Comedy about tycoon trapped in a body of a cat fails to entertain

Ican’t say I’ve ever been much of a cat person, but until now I’d never felt a deep and unassuageable longing to chase one down the street with a flame thrower. That’s all changed, though, thanks to Nine Lives, a film in which Kevin Spacey turns into a cat, and which makes the Garfield movies from ten years ago look like peak-form Billy Wilder.

Okay — the plot’s a bit more complicated than that. Spacey plays an egotistical Richard Branson-like billionaire (grey-blond hair, red logos) whose cognitive function is transmitted into the mind of a cat called Mr Fuzzypants when the pair simultaneously fall through a window during a lightning storm. (Don’t ask.)

This means Spacey’s body gets wheeled out of the film in a seemingly terminal coma after around 20 minutes — one sympathises — though his voice remains, trapped in Mr Fuzzypants’s head, for the duration. Even on a purely technical level, the conceit falls over almost immediately: Spacey’s dialogue is so poorly mixed with that of his co-stars that he might as well be shouting his lines at you in person from the corner of the cinema.

The big, wet, soppy hook, familiar to connoisseurs of Transmogrified Dad films such as Mrs Doubtfire, Liar Liar, The Santa Clause and Jack Frost, is that in the Mr Fuzzypants persona, Spacey is able to spend more time with his children than he ever was as a tycoon (as well as a schoolage daughter, he has an adult son from a previous marriage who works as an intern at Egomania HQ). Impressively, he also thwarts a hostile takeover of his company board, gets drunk on 50-year-old single malt, becomes a YouTube sensation and relieves

Dir: Barry Sonnenfeld Starring: Kevin Spacey, Jennifer Garner, Christopher Walken, Robbie Amell, Cheryl Hines. PG cert, 87 mins.

himself in an expensive handbag belonging to his ex-wife (Cheryl Hines).

Not a single frame of this improves on hellish, for a couple of crucial reasons. Number one: in the CGI-augmented comic set-pieces, Mr Fuzzypants looks less like a real cat than a piece of possessed taxidermy, and the effect is frankly horrific. And number two: every single scene, whether on the top of New York’s tallest skyscraper or in the centre of a bustling intersection, feels like its component parts were shot in various soundproofed broom cupboards, then stitched together on a computer.

The cast, which also includes Christopher Walken (a spooky pet shop owner) and Jennifer Garner (Spacey’s entirely featureless wife), talk past each other while staring hauntedly into the distance, making it easy to wonder if lines like “explain the joke to me”, “How do I get out of this?” and “We’re not seeing any cerebral activity at all” were ad-libbed on set.

Nothing here looks like a genuine interaction between real human beings: Spacey may be the first actor to give a comedic performance in which his own smile looks like it had to be greenscreened in at a later date. Dismayingly, the director is Barry Sonnenfeld, the former Coen brothers cinematographer behind the Men in Black and Addams Family films. A cat couldn’t have made a worse job of it.