Nine Lives

Barry Sonnenfeld's Nine Lives is a profoundly stupid movie.  It's about a billionaire New York businessman who is egotistical, full of himself and likes to put his name on every building he owns (Sound like anyone who's been in the headlines a lot this past year?), and how he learns to be a better father to his adult son and young daughter, and a better husband to his wife, while having his soul trapped in his daughter's cat.

Sometimes my mind boggles when certain movies get made.  This is one of those times.  Did anyone involved really think this was a good idea?  What scripts did the actors turn down in order to make this?  The movie stars Kevin Spacey.  Yes, Kevin Spacey, that most gifted and treasured of actors.  The man has won numerous awards, including the Oscar and the Tony.  Now he can probably expect a Razzie early next year.  To be fair, he's not sleepwalking through this movie, though you kind of wish he was.  He gives the material more effort than it deserves.  The movie also stars Jennifer Garner (Who with Mother's Day and now this, has the distinction of appearing in two of the worst movies I've seen so far this year.) as his wife, and Cheryl Hines as his ex-wife, who shows up to be humiliated once in a while.  When Hines shows up at his penthouse apartment, Kevin Spacey (in cat form) decides to use her expensive purse as a litter box.  Ho, ho.

Spacey is Tom Brand, who enjoys skydiving into press conferences via unconvincing green screen effects, and wants to build the world's tallest skyscraper.  When it's revealed that a building in Chicago is going to be taller, he has a fit, and threatens to miss his 11-year-old daughter's birthday party.  Still, he's determined to impress her, so he races around Manhattan for a pet cat that she wants.  This leads him to a tiny little pet shop run by a mysterious shopkeeper, played by Christopher Walken.  The performance Walken gives is sadly subdued.  A little bit of his strange humor would have done wonders.  Tom picks out a cat named Mr. Fuzzypants, and then decides to head back to his corporate building, so that he can go to the roof in the middle of a thunderstorm and yell at his corporate lackey Ian (Mark Consuelos), who he thinks is trying to sabotage the business deal.  To make a long story short, a stray thunderbolt knocks Tom off the roof,  placing him in a coma.

When Tom wakes up, his soul has been transported into the body of Mr. Fuzzypants, and he finds himself in the hospital where his wife and daughter are fretting over his unconscious human body.  Fortunately, Christopher Walken is there to explain what has happened, and tells him he has to learn to appreciate his family in the cat's body before the doctors pull the plug on his human body.  It's at this point that Tom asks a very good question that the movie fails to answer.  If his soul is inside the cat's body, what happened to the cat's soul?  Is it floating somewhere in limbo?  Tom's wife and daughter (who don't seem nearly as distressed as they should be that he is clinging to life) bring Mr. Fuzzypants home, not knowing that Tom is inhabiting the feline.  He tries to get their attention, but nothing seems to work.  It's not until he starts bonding with his daughter that he starts to realize how important his family is.

Nine Lives is credited to five different screenwriters, who must have gone home weary after a long day of dreaming up scenes like the one where Mr. Fuzzypants tries to open a bottle of scotch with his tiny paws.  The cat itself is played by a combination of a real cat, and a blatantly CG one for when it has to leap off a windowsill and bounce off an awning, or when it starts doing amazing dancing and backflip moves.  I'm not blaming the filmmakers for using special effects in order to display things that a real cat simply can't do.  I just wish they made more of an effort, so the effects would look slightly more convincing than Gumby and Pokey.  There's next to no plot here.  Yeah, it's revealed that the slimy Ian is trying to take over the company while Tom is comatose, and it's hinted that his current wife is thinking of leaving him.  But none of this matters.  This movie is far too bland for anything to make an impact.

This is a perfect movie for very little kids, or adults who don't care what they're watching, just as long as it's fairly inoffensive and nothing bad happens.  It's 90 minutes of pure mindless fluff with no nutritional value whatsoever.  And no, I am not exactly condemning all fluff.  I have enjoyed films that most have dismissed as such in the past.  This is simply bad fluff.  It's cheaply made, poorly written, and has absolutely nothing to offer other than those with the simplest of tastes.  This is yet another movie that feels like nobody really wanted to make it, and just showed up every day.  Again, I feel the need to ask, is this truly the best script these talented actors could find at the time?  Even if they were in the mood to do a light kid's movie, there had to be better options than this.

I will probably never know what drew Kevin Spacey to Nine Lives.  All I can say is I hope he got more out of it than I did.  At least he got paid.  I got to sit in the dark, and wonder what I was doing with my life for 90 minutes.

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