When you see a cast of Oscar winners Kevin Spacey and Christopher Walken appearing alongside Jennifer Garner in a movie directed by Barry Sonnenfeld who brought us the excellent Addams Family Values and Men In Black it should be peaking your interest but I had great trepidation about this as the trailers were just awful so I hoped that perhaps there was a clever of funny movie behind the scenes but I couldn’t have been more wrong.

I can only assume that the stars of this film owed a few favours otherwise there must have been more of this film on the cutting room floor than a Warner Brothers movie and even allowing for the fact that it was a French story to begin with, which was translated into English before shooting, I can’t excuse it.

Kevin Spacey is Tom Brand a multi millionaire business tycoon who is putting all his efforts into constructing the highest building in North America but is battling against a similar project in Chicago. Tom is all business and has little time to spend with his wife Lara (Jennifer Garner) or his young daughter Rebecca (Malina Weissman) who still adores her father despite his absence. He also has his son from a previous marriage David (Robbie Amell) working for the company and all he wants to do is impress his father but can never seem to do well enough.

When Tom is late for his daughters birthday he runs to a cat shop to pick her present out. This shop is run by Felix Perkins (Christopher Walken) in a way reminiscent of the Mogwli owner from Gremlins. On the way home Tom is in an accident which leaves him in a coma but transports him into the body of the cat where Walken then advises him that he has a week to change his ways and appreciate his family otherwise he will be stuck in the cats body forever and so should begin a series of cat capers which keep us chuckling away to the inevitable happy ending unfortunately that is not the case.

The CGI in this film is awful and it is so obviously not a cat in most of the scenes that it is criminal in this day and age of technology. The attempted humour is terrible, calling the cat Mister Fuzzy Pants is not funny, Walken calls himself a cat whisperer, when Spacey is ‘talking’ to his family in the cats body it sounds like two Tom’s fighting in an alley and was grating on my nerves, the cat toilet humour and threat of castration scenes were cheap and the supposed emotional scenes achieved nothing since the rest of the movie had already made me feel dead inside. There were about ten people watching this movie at the same time I was, including some young kids, and not one person laughed or even chuckled throughout which must be a first for an comedy movie that I’ve watched.

I don’t know who the movie is actually supposed to be aimed at as some of the themes like divorce and euthanasia were too adult for young kids to understand, there were references to movies and images from the 1970’s and 1980’s which older kids won’t get and there was nothing to make an adult want to see the movie. I reckon even the most ardent of cat lovers will struggle to like this so this says it all about how bad this film is.

Do yourselves a favour and watch the very underrated Fluke if you want a good film about a man trapped in an animals body. If you want to keep cat loving children entertained for an hour or so stick an hour of cat videos on You Tube and save your time and money, in conclusion this movie you will wish to FURget. Come on, there were so many options for silly puns in the review you have to allow me one.

DJ Speaks Rating: 3 Out Of 10