The life of an every-day workaholic is about to get a little furry. In “Nine Lives”, Tom Brand (Kevin Spacey) is a daredevil billionaire at the top of his game. His company FireBrand is nearing completion on its greatest achievement to date: the tallest skyscraper in the northern hemisphere. But Tom’s lifestyle has disconnected him from his family, particularly his beautiful wife Lara (Jennifer Garner) and his adoring daughter Rebecca (Malina Weissman). Rebecca’s 11th birthday comes, and she wants the gift she wants every year, a cat. Tom hates cats, but he is without a gift and time is running out. His GPS directs him to a mystical pet store brimming with odd and exotic cats, where the store’s eccentric owner, Felix Perkins (Christopher Walken), presents him with a majestic tomcat, named Mr. Fuzzypants. A bizarre turn of events finds Tom trapped inside the body of Mr. Fuzzypants. Adopted by his own family, he begins to experience what life is like for the family pet, and as a cat, Tom begins to see his family and his life through a new and unexpected perspective. Tom will have to learn why he has been placed in this peculiar situation and the great lengths he must go to earn back his human existence. “Nine Lives” is directed by Barry Sonnenfeld, and is rated PG for thematic elements, language and some rude humor.

If you have a cat who is disobedient and seems to cause nothing but mischief around the house, I guarantee that sitting them through a watch of “Nine Lives” will have them wishing all of their lives were spent. Where does a studio have to even go wrong to create something this dreadful? It’s terrible for adult crowds, it’s too dull with long spans of boredom for small crowds, and doesn’t even succeed as a cute animal film at the very least. No, what you get here from Barry Sonnenfeld of all people, is a presentation that barely can be classified as a movie. Seeing the trailers will set the mood for the kind of purrrrrgatory (See what I did there?) that you will under-take in 82 minutes of cinematic coma that awaits you in this movie, but you will never know the full extent unless you hate yourself enough to see it. The visuals are cheaply produced, the dialogue is strangle-worthy, and the script, what little there is, never establishes enough of an argument to justify its existence. How can I relate the level of sheer torture this movie involves? Let me count the ways.

The film feels so lazy, mostly because it seems to take the easy way out on every single aspect. With the story, this whole ordeal that turns Spacey into a cat is never explained in the slightest detail. The movie knows how ridiculous a concept this is, but to even hint that there will be a solution later on to how our main protagonist wakes up to be a feline is even more insulting. By this, Walken’s character in the film specifically states “You want to know how you got like this. You are just going to have to find out”. THAT’S IT!!! That’s the most we ever hear about this transformation ever again. The rest of the movie is mostly stupid cat problems to fill in the time opposite of this subplot that is somehow even worse than the main premise of this movie. That entails Spacey’s son (Played by Robbie Amell) fulfilling his Father’s wishes to have the tallest building in Chicago. That’s plot adversity in this movie; which business downtown will have the tallest building. If you can talk yourself into believing this bizarrely stupid concept in the first place, you won’t even waste time trying to decipher what Spacey’s business actually sells. The whole movie, from news pieces to board meetings, is about figuring out a way to push their building even higher to the sky. If a six year old wrote about the cut-throat world of the seedy underbelly of the financial world, this is what they would come up with.

The visual presentation gives a lot of laughs. Unfortunately none of them are intentional. This is the kind of computer generation and background visuals that we would expect in a Purina commercial, but somehow this movie that was made for $500,000 got a big screen release. That is the only brilliant decision that the production of this movie made, because inevitably this one will make its money back, but oh at what cost. The movements of the cat feel foreign to anything that you have ever let into your house. His movements with the outside scenes feel sloppy, and a lot of that is on the very coloring alteration between what is real and what is added post-shoot. The shading on the outline of the cat with the live action backgrounds casts this one as a borderline cartoon. Some films will make an attempt to movie the mouth of the animal that the actor is voicing, but not here. No effort is preserved at the slightest hint, and this is made even more apparent when the live actors are forced to physically react to an animal actor who is dominantly computer generated. Nothing feels believable or inspiring about the interactions here, and several scenes are made even worst with some shoddy editing. Scenes just end without any rhyme or reason to their creative direction, and because of this nothing ever flows smoothly in transition from one scene to the next.

I want to talk about the performances, and what will be the last big screen role for a lot of actors for their immediate futures. Kevin Spacey is currently one of the biggest stars in the world, riding the success of “House of Cards”, so I couldn’t even fathom why a man of his caliber would even partake in such garbage. Then it hit me: Spacey in human form is in this movie for no longer than ten minutes. So there’s very little that Hollywood will actually hold against him when his career shudders off someday. Spacey enjoys very little excitement throughout the film. His character is a grouch, but his energy feels light even for Spacey’s usual soft-voiced demeanor. The hardest part to investing yourself in this movie is to feel bad for someone who is filthy rich and fighting over building size. This right-off-the-bat made it an uphill climb with actually taking this movie seriously for five minutes, but it only gets worse with his family. Jennifer Garner continues to give screen reactions that make me laugh-out-loud in an otherwise quiet auditorium. Her delivery feels so forced considering she has to be the film’s serious side, and it just doesn’t blend well with the slapstick tone in the movie around her. She’s that character that will always make you say in embarrassment “Ohhhh Jen”. Christopher Walken I’m pretty sure portrays the same character he did in 2006’s “Click”. They seem to just cast him in anything that involves something highly ridiculous that you can’t explain, and let him loose on a camera. His scenes were what little I did enjoy about this movie, and that’s not much. The worst of all the performances however, comes from two female child actors (Played by Weissman and Talitha Bateman). I have been told before that it’s wrong to demean a child’s performance, but if they want to avoid these kind of mistakes again, they will listen to the Freak’s advice. That advice is simple; immerse yourself in human contact for as long as you can before you take on your next role. These two girls who are portrayed as best friends, do things in overreaction that will beat a laugh or two out of you. To believe that anyone is this uneven with human emotion is frightening.

Overall, “Nine Lives” is an insult to cats and audiences alike. This film claws on early for dear life, but ends up becoming the anti-catnip during a second act that struggles to find any conflict within this spoiled group of characters. This box needs changed NOW.

2/10