Coughs up a hairball over this confusion of a cat caper
who is really a man, but even the most far-fetched fantasy must contain internal logic. Nine Lives has more holes in it than a cat has whiskers. What child takes a new pet home (after said pet has fallen off a building and spent half the day in hospital) and doesn’t give it food, water or a litter box until the following morning? Who puts a litter box in the kitchen? How many cats drink whisky?
On the last point, it is obvious that the writers (a team too large to list here, which is always telling) could not agree on whether Mr Fuzzypants (played by five Siberian and ragdoll cats called Jean, Philmon, Connery, Roxie and Yuri) should be a cat inhabited by a man but still able to do cat things and eat cat food, or a man with man tastes and limitations clumsily coming to terms with living in a cat’s body.
The resulting flip-floppery is exhaustingly unfunny. One minute Mr Fuzzypants is splatting against the wall like a Garfield cartoon (if it’s computer-generated, does it still qualify as cruelty?), the next he is elegantly scaling a building. The parkour scenes look as though they feature real cats, but their fluency is marred by a backing track of unnecessary and unrealistic meeyowling.
The only catlike thing about Nine Lives is that it couldn’t be bothered trying to convince the audience of anything. It would rather lie on the couch and yawn while you wonder what on earth Spacey is doing in such a film. At least Christopher Walken, who plays a pet-shop owner with supernatural powers, has the grace to look embarrassed when he murmurs “I’m a cat whisperer”. LS
Another shot at nine lives
The documentary Nine Lives: Cats in Istanbul (known as KEDi in some countries) has not yet been released in South Africa, but reviews indicate that watching Turkish cats play themselves is infinitely more entertaining than the Hollywood movie of the same name. It is, according to its website, “a film about the hundreds of thousands of cats who have roamed the metropolis of Istanbul freely for thousands of years, wandering in and out of people’s lives, impacting them in ways only an animal who lives between the worlds of the wild and the tamed can”. LS