Kevin Spacey (“K-Pax”), who is apparently being severely underpaid for his work in “House of Cards,” stars as Tom Brand, a New York real estate titan who likes to put his name on buildings, hire his children in key positions, and treat people so monstrously that his behavior would seem unrealistic if not for the fact that the character’s real-life equivalent is currently running for President. Judging by the 89 minutes that follow, people don’t care about you all that much either. “Cat’s don’t care about you,” begins the film’s opening voiceover. Directed by Barry Sonnenfeld (“Men in Black”) and written by one of the finest algorithms money can buy, this derivative story about the very secret lives of pets is quite possibly the worst thing to happen to cats since dogs. And voicing Mr Fuzzypants, Spacey sounds uncommonly lethargic – like Francis Underwood, stripped of all his verve.Less funny than the average cat gif and approximately 1,000 times as long, the astonishingly stupid “ Nine Lives” is too fluffy and frivolous to be the worst movie of the summer, but it might just be the laziest. The limp direction lacks the wacky sensibility that characterizes Sonnenfeld’s best work. The script is out to pasture, neglecting to address the interior lives of all of its characters, and failing to deliver a single good punchline. While his wife and daughter barely shed a tear before shifting all of their focus over to the trouble-making addition.Īnd therein lies the problem with Nine Lives: it’s lazy on every level. The son from his first marriage (Robbie Arnell), who works for him, appears more intent on managing the business than monitoring his father’s health. So as Brand’s body is left comatose in a hospital bed and his new feline body tries to convince his owners that he’s not in fact Mr Fuzzypants, there’s a competing storyline involving that associate’s plan to sell off Brand’s company.Īlarmingly, no one in Brand’s life, including his co-workers and family, seems to care that he’s laid up on life support. The metamorphosis doesn’t take effect, however, until Brand falls several stories from the peak of his building as the result of a heated altercation with a scheming colleague (Mark Consuelos). Walken’s “cat whisperer” senses as much when the tycoon shows up at his enchanted cat store, where Brand goes last-minute to appease his kid for her birthday (his assistant must have had the day off), and puts a spell on the curmudgeon. “I hate cats,” Brand scoffs at the suggestion. Spacey’s character, Tom Brand, is a Donald Trump-like New York real estate titan so hellbent on constructing the highest skyscraper the city has to offer that he neglects his second wife (Jennifer Garner), whose calls he refuses to answer during work hours, and his young daughter (Melina Weissman), who pines for a pet cat. The bulk of the blame goes to Nine Live’s screenplay, credited to five writers (never a good sign), that fatally rips the fun out of the concept, by mostly being about a shady business takeover. A feline spin on the popular body swap genre, from the director of The Addams Family and Men in Black films, has the makings of summer slam dunk – not an outright dud. It features Kevin Spacey playing another egomaniacal prick, magically transformed by everyone’s favorite weirdo, Christopher Walken, into a sassy household cat to learn how to be a better husband and parent. Just how inept? It’s a comedy pitched at families that climaxes with a supposed suicide attempt. In a year that’s already given us turkeys like Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, Warcraft and Suicide Squad, Nine Lives ranks as the most spectacularly inept studio offering yet. Cynics will scoff that its director Barry Sonnenfeld probably wants his name expunged from the project, which he very well might.
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