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70So good it breaks your heart for not being better. It is kept from brilliance by a soggy climax and a clumsy central narrative device.
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58Myers' Cat, with a voice that crosses Bert Lahr's Cowardly Lion with Mel Blanc's Bugs Bunny, is generally fun, possessed of an anarchic playfulness that balances his sometimes bawdy tendencies.
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50It's another overwrought clunker like "How the Grinch Stole Christmas," all effects and stunts and CGI and prosthetics, with no room for lightness and joy.
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50Long on visual dazzle but short on warmth, and the humor is excessively raunchy for a family film.
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50It's moderately engaging for the first half-hour, somewhat trying during the second half hour, and virtually unbearable over the final twenty minutes. It's a marginally recommendable film for kids, but not necessarily for parents.
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50Attractively designed, energetically performed and, above all, blessedly concise, this adaptation of one of the most popular American kids' books of all time walks the safe side of surrealism with its fur-flying shenanigans. The younger the viewers, the better reactions are bound to be.
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40Emerges as a lackluster and nearly charmless affair.
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40Left me feeling empty inside. There’s no warmth and character from the original Dr. Seuss book, and there’s no substance or soul in the story elements.
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40A few laughs come from Alec Baldwin as Mom’s posturing, deceitful boyfriend, but attempts at inserting risqué modern humour sit uneasily with the playfully innocent surrealism of Seuss’ famous characters.
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40Myers is the movie's fatal flaw, squeezing out the other characters who fatten the plot, mostly with an eye to parents.
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38Although a literal movie adaptation of Seuss' 1957 classic "The Cat in the Hat" might have run 20 minutes, is it too much to ask that the filmed material preserve the author's sensibility?
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38A semi-intriguing abomination, the movie The Cat in the Hat takes a piece of classic childhood Americana and turns it into something garish, dumb, ugly and senseless.
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30Very young children, it should be said, probably won't have any problem with the movie. It's bright and perky on the surface. But for anyone mature enough to pay closer attention, it's going to fall short of expectations.
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30Grazer's writing team has filled up the film's 82 minutes with winking product placements, SNL-type goofs, PG gags premised on not quite cursing, a Smashmouth cover of the Beatles' "Getting Better," and a lame subplot about a scuzzy lothario (Stephen Baldwin).
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25Talk about your quick-buck exploitation.
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It's a sort of soullessly cheerful cynicism that is about as far from Seuss as one can imagine.
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25Charmless and grating and immediately forgettable.
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25Everything to treasure about that magical, slightly malevolent feline of childhood verse is obliterated in the coarse, charmless Dr. Seuss' The Cat in the Hat.
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25It pains me to tell you, But really, it's true: The Cat in the Hat Is a piece of dog doo.
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25It is an embarrassment and an insult to a character that has been beloved by kids for 45 years.
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25Dr. Seuss' The Cat in the Hat is gorged with shtick and gadgetry. When it comes to highlighting everything better left in the dark, it makes even the Matrix sequels look like works of genius.
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25As a British politician said of a corrupt but articulate peer, "The Cat in the Hat" is like a rotten mackerel seen by moonlight: It shines as it stinks.
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25Someone (Myers?) came up with the bright idea of turning the Cat in the Hat into the worst Vegas nightclub spritzer of 1958. He's become a furry version of Rip Taylor: a walking, talking vaudeville idiot box.
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25Where "The Cat" book was anarchistic but ultimately sweet-spirited, this movie is ugly, dumb and colossally mean-spirited.
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20Frenetic and cheerless action aside, the film's real problem is the Cat, who looks most unmagically like a second-string college sports mascot and conducts himself like a risque baggy-pants comedian.
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20The movie is crass and vulgar almost beyond belief.
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20A vulgar, uninspired lump of poisoned eye candy.
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12If the producers had dug up Ted Geisel's body and hung it from a tree, they couldn't have desecrated the man more.
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12I do hate to say it -- it's really a drag, but why did they let this Cat out of the bag?
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11They've taken a classic and they've battered it senseless and, boy, does it stink. It’s so bad it’s amazing it's being released, and box office-goers might soon end up fleeced. And annoyed and bewildered, perhaps even creeped-out by this cacophonous mess which is awful throughout.
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10The ongoing cinematic desecration of Dr. Seuss' legacy continues with The Cat In The Hat, a clattering abomination that makes it depressingly likely that an entire generation of reading-averse children will know The Cat In The Hat as that obnoxious character Mike Myers played in that horrible movie.
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10Such a remarkable rift between its charming source material and its heinous cinematic realization that the producers may as well have skipped the hassle of securing licensing rights and simply called this mess Mike Myers: A--hole in Fur.
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10Critics are paid to suffer bad art, no matter how icky it is from the start. So all we could do was to Sit! Sit! Sit! Sit! And we did not like it. Not one little bit.
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10Like being run over by a garbage truck that backs up and dumps its load on top of you. It's a sloppy and vulgar burlesque, one of the most repulsive kiddie movies ever made.
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0The narrative itself, attributed to three former "Seinfeld" writers who also worked on "The Grinch," reeks of desperation.
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0Comes scarily close to being the most unendurable Hollywood creation of the last dozen years.
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0An abomination, impure and simple.