The Cat in the Hat review: Bill Hader is a delight, but the Cat's new day job is a slog

Somewhere inside Warner Bros.' new The Cat in the Hat is a lovely 75-minute cartoon. It is buried under a workplace comedy, three villains, a sea of slapstick sidekicks and a lesson about career planning. Bill Hader is a very good Cat. The movie around him behaves like a child who has had two slices of cake and found the art supplies. It will keep young kids busy. It will keep their parents checking the time.

Bill Hader is the best thing in it#

Hader plays the Cat with bounce and speed. The Guardian's Jesse Hassenger calls his performance a highlight with "occasional Robin Williams-style vocal-chameleon shifts" in an otherwise "exhausting, overblown enterprise." That is a fair split. Hader sounds like he is having fun, which is more than the script manages most of the time.

Matt Berry is the other win. He voices Waffles, the family goldfish, who suddenly talks. Berry has spent a career making pompous men sound grand and doomed, and a fish is a natural next step. IGN's review found solid laughs on a fairly frequent basis, many of them from the voice cast.

The Cat now has a boss, an HR rep and a performance review#

The film's big idea is that the Cat is an employee. He works for the Institute for the Institution of Imagination and Inspiration, LLC, a firm that sends creatures out to cheer up bored or sad kids. The Guardian notes that his success is measured on an "emotiscope" and his damage on a "mess-o-meter." The Cat scores high on both. His boss, Mr. Hoogeboom (Giancarlo Esposito), gives him one last chance.

That chance is Gabby (Xochitl Gomez) and her younger brother Sebastian (Tiago Martinez). Their mom (America Ferrera) has moved the family to a new town for work. Gabby misses home. The Cat finds a gadget called the Go-Backer that might let her return to the past. Things go wrong, as things do when a cat brings tools.

Hassenger's sharpest point is that the film turns Dr. Seuss into office life for kids, complete with friendly HR staff and less friendly landlords. RogerEbert.com's Zachary Lee quotes the Cat dreading a meeting with "my boss and my HR representative" and argues these jokes are aimed so clearly at adults that they stick out. We agree. The original book had a fish who worried about rules. This one has a corporate org chart. Progress.

Too many villains, too many Things#

Lee counts no fewer than three villains, plus side characters with their own arcs that never quite fit. Quinta Brunson voices Sherri, a friend of the Cat. Bowen Yang plays an intern. A big shadowy creature called Something gives chase. Each idea is fine. All of them at once is a lot.

Then there are the Things. In the book there are two. Here there are many. They communicate in fart noises and slap each other, and Lee says they exist partly to compete with Universal's Minions. The film even jokes that they will get their own movie soon. It is the most honest line in the script.

The Guardian also spots borrowing elsewhere: the Cat's workplace looks a lot like the factory in Monsters, Inc., and his "best day ever!" line echoes Disney's Tangled. None of this is a crime. It just makes the film feel assembled rather than imagined.

The animation is the reason to forgive it#

When the movie slows down, it can be lovely. Lee describes an opening where the kids are drawn in black and white, glued to their phones, while the Cat stays in full color. Later the family's moving boxes become small worlds. Folded laundry flaps around like whales. Old pasta crafts point the way. The kids slowly start to look like the Cat's cartoon style as they fall deeper into his world.

That is a real idea, done with skill. It is also a reminder of the quieter film this could have been.

Is it too long?#

Yes, for a picture book. Rotten Tomatoes lists the running time as 1 hour 47 minutes. IGN says it starts to drag in its third act because too many conflicts overlap. Hassenger asks how a 1,600-word book pushes toward two hours. Add the trailers and a new Looney Tunes short that plays before the film, and you have a long afternoon.

Not every critic minded. Alonso Duralde at The Film Verdict said it captures the "anarchic yet warm-hearted spirit" of the book and was wise to send the Cat on a new adventure.

What critics and audiences say#

Critics are split down the middle and audiences are not. The film has 49 percent from 63 critics and an 88 percent audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. Metacritic has it at 46, "mixed or average". It opened second at the box office with about $20 million, behind Godzilla Minus Zero.

Basics are from Rotten Tomatoes and RogerEbert.com.

The verdict#

This Cat in the Hat is a clear step up from the 2003 live-action version, which is a low bar to step over. Hader and Berry are good company. The animation has real wit. But the film never trusts a simple story to hold a child's attention, so it shouts. The mess it leaves behind is, as the Guardian put it, the most Seussian thing about it.

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