Saturday 30th October 2010

Cats & Dogs

Director: Lawrence Guterman
Year: 2001
Stars: Elizabeth Perkins, Jeff Goldblum, Alexander Pollock, Tobey Maguire (voice), Alec Baldwin (voice), Sean Hayes (voice)

This film is too long. It's also firmly aimed at 6 year olds. We sat down to watch it at 10am on a Saturday morning, when we "weren't" going to watch much TV before getting up and dressed. 30 minutes later, and we were quite enjoying the movie. An hour later we were a little bored, but had watched 2/3s of the movie, so were determined to stick it out to the end.

The plot is fairly obvious - cats are evil and want to take over the world, and dogs are going to stop them by ensuring the cats don't get hold of a formula that will ensure no humans are allergic to dogs.

It's actually not that different in terms of plot arches and devices to a vast number of (not-that-good) adult action movies. But you do have to suspend disbelief when cats and dogs start flying around and zooming off to secret agent bases. Hence it probably working better for 6-year olds, who are almost always far more imaginative than your average adult.

By the end of the movie both Dan and I had felt like all our senses had been assaulted, and we were both left shaking our heads trying to deal with what we had just seen (or been bashed over the head with).

Rating: 2.5 out of 5