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CHRISTMAS Day can never quite live up to December 24.
Your anticipation renders you unable to sleep.
You don’t know what you’re going to get but you know it’s going to be good.
This year, my December 24 was December 18.
On December 19, the embargo was finally lifted on reviews of the new Cats film.
Ever since the release of a trailer in July that packed more harrowing scenes into its 144 seconds than an entire series of Black Mirror and contained more ill-advised uses of technology than an entire series of Black Mirror, snarky weirdos like me have been desperate to find out if the film lived down to that preview.
I’m delighted to report it’s received the worst reviews since I premiered my one-man play Drunken Fool With Kebab Sauce on his Shirt for my wife.
The Telegraph’s Robbie Collin called it “a mesmerisingly ugly fiasco that makes you feel like your brain is being eaten by a parasite” and called the experience of sitting through it “so stressful that it honestly brought on a migraine”.
That paper’s critic Tom Robey handed it his first zero-star review in nine years.
He said: “Once seen, the only realistic way to fix Cats would be to spay it, or simply pretend it never happened. Because it’s an all-time disaster”.
The same questions kept cropping up. What were they thinking? What’s the deal with their genitalia? James Corden?
In an endlessly rewatchable 10-minute rant, the BBC reviewer Mark Kermode once called Sex and the City 2 “an orgy of dripping wealth that made me want to be sick”.
Legendary American reviewer Roger Ebert also said of Bruce Willis flop North: “I hated this movie. Hated, hated, hated, hated, hated this movie. Hated it.”
To those glorious ranks, we can now add Comicsbeat.com’s description of Cats as “the worst thing to happen to cats since dogs”.
As with any flop, there are doubtless plenty of good people who worked hard on it with good intentions, and don’t deserve to have the film as a stain on their reputations.
At the same time, there’s James Corden.