Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 1981 musical is adapted to the big screen by Tom Hooper who brought us the 2012 adaptation of Les Miserables.

It is hard to sum up how bad I thought this film was so I’ll start by saying I have never seen the stage show so have no context as to if this is a faithful adaptation, but my main takeaway was that if this is any reflection on the stage show how on Earth was it so popular?

To say the plot is thin would be polite. There are a group of cats called Jellicles who every year have a sing off to decide who ascends to the Heaviside Layer and get a new life. It’s never explained what any of that means but they do say the word Jellicle an awful lot. Essentially it allows us to get introduced to an array of cats who each then get to sing about themselves in their audition to be chosen.

The only positives to take away from the whole film would be Francesca Hayward’s graceful dancing (she is a member of the Royal Ballet), Steven McRae’s tap dancing as the train cat and Jennifer Hudson belting out Memories.

Literally nothing else works though. Most importantly for a musical none of the other songs lodge in the mind and some of the cast involved patently can’t sing, Idris Elba and Judi Dench I’m looking at you. The fact that the opening two cats we meet are portrayed by Rebel Wilson and James Corden doing comedy skits that completely miss the mark doesn’t engender any good will either.

All of the original fuss over the CGI choices seems minor in comparison to the thin plot and weak songs. You quickly get used to the main cat effects and if they used this uniformly across the board it would probably be fine. It’s when they have mice and cockroaches with human faces that things start to get weird, as are some of the cats that wear costumes on top of their cat bodies.

The final word on it is probably the more succinct review from my 9 year old son. When I asked him what he thought his response was, “Meh, what was it even about anyway?”