Cats & Dogs
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Cats & Dogs is a 2001 American-Australian spy action-comedy film. The film was directed by Lawrence Guterman with screenplay by John Requa and Glenn Ficarra, and stars Jeff Goldblum, Elizabeth Perkins and Alexander Pollock. It was released on July 4, 2001 by Warner Bros. Pictures, Village Roadshow Pictures, Zide/Perry Productions, and Rhythm and Hues Studios. The film received mixed reviews from critics, but it was a success at the box office, grossing $200,687,492 on a $60 million budget.
Plot
The film uncovers the truth about the high-tech, secret war being waged in neighborhoods everywhere that humans aren't even aware of: an eternal struggle between the two great armies of Cats and Dogs. The story follows a Cat plan to destroy a new vaccine that, if developed, would destroy all human allergies to Dogs, and the Dogs' efforts to stop the Cats from executing their plan.
Bad Qualities
- Very weak and clichéd plot that is easily predictable and forgettable.
- Almost all the dogs in this movie look poorly trained and constantly distracted by whatever they see.
- All the dogs are even portrayed as the good guys while the cats are the villains, which is a fictional stereotype/cliché of cats and dogs themselves which totally dangers their reputations between dogs and cats in real life. The sequels do introduce an organization of heroic cats as well, but the dogs are still all portrayed heroically.
- Poor acting from the human actors.
- The ancient Egyptian backstory scene of the secret war between cats and dogs is literally unbelievable and feels offensive to cat people. Especially when using the cliche of making cats out to be evil creatures when that wasn't really the case.
- Overuse of pointless fast-forwarding effects.
- Speaking of effects, the CGI is horrendous and at times laughable. The way every dog's eyes are animated is notably weird.
- The puppet hands for the dogs look a bit fake.
- Overabundance of cartoon sound effects is always heard in almost about every fight scene, which can be grating to listen to because of how it is used. Especially when one head-shaking sound effect is often reused in other scenes outside of fighting.
- Very unfunny jokes and gross-out humor (e.g. poop jokes and fart jokes).
- The film's concept and the story would've fleshed out and done better as an animated film instead of live-action.
Good Qualities
- The concept of cats and dogs as spies is somewhat interesting.
- The main antagonist, Mr. Tinkles, is the best character in the whole movie and a hilarious villain. It's worth noting that he is completely animated throughout most of the movie, with the CGI for him being passable. Which allows more control of the character instead of being played by a real cat.
- Somewhat decent musical score.
- It can easily be enjoyed by many despite being bad, especially kids.
- The rest of the characters, including the humans, are likable and tolerable.
- The storytelling is somewhat creative and original, it just contains lots of poor pacing over it.
Reception
Cats & Dogs has a 54% approval rating at Rotten Tomatoes based upon 117 reviews (63 positive, 54 negative) with an average rating of 5.5/10. The site's critical consensus reads: "A great concept, but the movie fails to develop the characters and some of the jokes are hit-or-miss.". On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 47 out of 100 based upon 26 reviews, indicating "mixed or average reviews".
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