Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore

I repeat: This is a CHILDREN'S MOVIE!!

There's a lot of up and down votes on something that really wasn't meant for critically snarky 30-somethings. Get a grip!

The First Movie was interesting because the concept of our pets being part of shadow spy organizations that stayed out of human sight was an eye-opener. Following up on the initial break-out is always an up-hill slog.

This one was Okay. Crazed Cat Villain attempts to take over the world by making all dogs go crazy so humans will put them all into kennels. Both Canine and Feline Organizations get together to prevent disaster. what follows is EASY and ENTERTAINING to a Child. . .

Repeat: 'Entertaining to a Child', not someone's Little Genius who reads the New York Times for Bedtime Stories!

The references and gags put in for the accompanying adults are there to LIGHTLY ENTERTAIN us by eliciting Pun-Groans or soft snickers. They ARE NOT trying to give you a Comedy Central Sidetrack. The Adult is NOT the Target Audience here. If they did that, IT WOULD NOT BE A KID MOVIE ANYMORE!

Personally, I groaned at the Batman/Joker redux of Kitty Galore. Then I smiled at the Dangerous Kitty doing the Silence of the Lambs sendup.

And the rest of the time, I just sat back and enjoyed a rambunctious, Tom & Jerry style action romp simply because I wanted to be entertained by something lighthearted.

And the Pigeon was a Hoot!

Simply put: A good clean Movie for Little Kids that won't put the adult to sleep. Or even if you don't have Kids, and you want something light and silly to watch that doesn't require thought, this is an easy choice. Enough said.

Cats & Dogs [2]: The Revenge of Kitty Galore (1:22, PG-13, 3-D) — other: talking animals; 3rd string; sequel

I created the "talking animals" subcategory after years of frustration trying to figure out whether to slot things like this under SF, fantasy, or elsewhere. Now no agonizing is required: Anything that involves chatty critters (or cars, babies, vegetables, toys, or other entities that aren't actually capable of speech) just gets dumped here.

There's a general sense that these things tend to be kiddie fare with low production values and even lower IQ expectations. But a review of the 74 such movies since 2000 shows that they aren't much different than SF&F movies in general, coming in with an average rating of 4.92 on my scale of 1-9 (compared to a 4.93 average for the other 474 movies in my database). Some of them have been superb (Bolt, Toy Story 2, Up), and others very good (Charlotte's Web, Finding Nemo, The Golden Compass, a couple of Ice Age movies, Monsters Inc., Ratatouille, Toy Story 3, and Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit).

At the other end of the scale are the movies that give rise to the stereotype: Garfield, Scooby Doo, Space Chimps, Alvin and the Chipmunks, Beverly Hills Chihuahua, VeggieTales, Marmaduke, Rugrats, Furry Vengeance, and 2 wretched excrescences called Yu-Gi-Oh and Tamala 2010.

The original Cats & Dogs (2001) was dead average with a 5 rating. It certainly was not the kind of artistic triumph or blockbuster hit that demanded a sequel, but we got one anyway, this one in (all together now: ooooooo) 3-D, as if that alone justifies its existence. Is it a dog or the cat's meow? (Puns intended; please don't hurt me.)

Well, in the tradition of such things, there are bones thrown (ouch) to the adults, including a lot of smirky allusions to the James Bond oeuvre. 007 fans will recognize that "Kitty Galore" is a pun on Bond girl Pussy Galore (itself a smirking pun on something that will never sneak into a PG movie). There are silhouettes and sultry female vocals under the opening credits. And Bond actor (1973-1985) Roger Moore does one of the voices, for "Tab Lazenby", head of Mousers Enforcing Our World's Safety (MEOWS), reminding old farts like me that the immediate successor to Sean Connery was not Moore but the hapless George Lazenby, about whom nothing has been heard since 1969.

Nor do they stop there. I have to give Writers Ron Friedman and Steve Bencich and Director Brad Peyton credit for working really hard at throwing in a lot of code words, images, and background business designed to appeal to adults. Much of it was pretty clever, including allusions to movies made well before the target audience for this film was even born. But the result is schizophrenic. It's like going to see the Jerry Lewis version of Hamlet and discovering Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud playing Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

In the final analysis, tho, do we go to see a movie just for the puns?*

No, we don't, and regrettably the ostensible surface plot of the movie, tho crammed with substance, snappy dialog, and a certain cockeyed coherence, is pretty insipid. Once again, dogs and cats are portrayed as mortal enemies enslaved to their basic natures, except that this time they're required to *gasp* work together to foil the evil machinations of criminal mastermind Kitty Galore, who intends to broadcast a worldwide dog-whistle tone (from a CD helpfully Sharpied with the legend "The Call of the Wild") that will turn her canine nemeses into snarling menaces, thus bringing their doom upon them as an alarmed humanity wipes them all out. There are more twists and turns as well (as I said, no lack of filling), but it's all pretty much of the same caliber.

The voice cast features many B-list names for no discernible reason and to no audible benefit (except for Bette Midler as Kitty), and the visual cast is a bunch of animals trained to assume unnatural positions and have matchmove artists do strange CGI things with their jaws. This is only fitfully effective.

I saw the film in 3-D. The good news is that the main feature was preceded by "Coyote Falls", a 3-minute roadrunner cartoon in a passable imitation of the grand cel-animation tradition, and it used 3-D to marvelous advantage with Wile E.'s latest Acme acquisition, a bungee cord. The bad news is that the 3-D imaging in the movie itself was sloppy, with numerous cases of dogs having doubled snouts, or a patch of fur seeming to float above the surface of the cat it was nominally attached to. This is a movie that didn't care enuf to send the very best.

I do appreciate the attempt to give the adults something to care about, tho, and it was accomplished without having to distract the kids from the story they came to see, so the overall effect is to get a gentleman's D+ from me.

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*Besides, for SF&F fans, they're not even nerd puns.

This belated sequel to the 2001 box-office hit Cats & Dogs is better than I expected. That's not to say it's great, it's not, but there have been far inferior kiddie films I've sat through this year with my four year old (not naming any names... Alvin and Shrek). There's free-flowing action that will entertain the younglings and the animals themselves are cute and/or funny enough to please all audience members, though the plot has more than its fair share of eye-rolling moments and the CGI is poorer than it should be considering the movie's $85m budget.

The gags are hit or miss, however the few that stick are quite amusing. A riff on Silence of the Lambs is hilarious and provides the sole laugh-out-loud scene whilst the Head of M.E.O.W (the feline secret service agency) Tab Lazenby – cheekily voiced by Roger Moore – offers plenty of 007 parodied humour. Elsewhere the talented voice cast do their best to inject energy into the frequently lack-lustre and cheesy script. Marsden is likable as lead mutt Diggs, Nolte is gruff as ever as Alec Baldwin's replacement for the hardened Butch, Applegate brings the sass as Catherine and Midler is clearly having a blast as the malevolent Kitty. Chris O'Donnell fares a lot worse as live-action character Shane, Diggs' loving ex-cop partner, his unabashed mugging an absolute low in his career.

Decent enough viewing with the nippers on a wet weekend.

2.5 out of 5 (1 - Rubbish, 2 - Ordinary, 3 - Good, 4 - Excellent, 5 - Classic)

I went to the cinema to watch this movie because my girlfriend really appreciated the first part which I've never seen and she convinced me to come with her. She bought the DVD of the first movie and there was a special gift card in it which allowed her to have a reduction of ten dollars on a ticket for the sequel and so we went to the cinema.

I didn't expect anything from this movie and I wouldn't usually comment on such a movie because it is simply not my kind of genre, but as I see now such horrible votes and the movie entering in the infamous top one hundred bottom list, I thought I'd be better if I might write my opinion, because this movie isn't simply that bad - and I am generally kind of severe on movies! While watching this movie for one and a half hour, I've never taken a look on my watch, I've never felt bored at all and I found this movie very entertaining. There were also a lot of nice laughs, especially the naive but sympathetic pigeon was worth the watch - and let me tell you that it is rather difficult to make me laugh. Beside the pigeon, the little girl which always saw the animals making crazy things while her mother didn't recognize anything was an entertaining running gag, too. Another funny thing was the scene in the animal's Alcatraz which I thought was a nice idea. The collaboration, the prejudices and the growing team spirit between the secret agencies of the cats and the dogs were also some really nice elements in this movie even if they were predictable. And the movie even had something philosophical: Cats and dogs put away their prejudices to save their beloved humans together and fight a common enemy. Well, I know, this is a predictable content, too, but still very touching and even teaching for young kids who are watching this movie. And the idea of adapting the world of James Bond to the world of cats and dogs isn't silly at all, but very funny for the kids, nicely done for the adults who understand some funny allusions and certainly better than most of the boring super agent comedy movie in the key of Austin Powers and other boring stuff.

A part of that, the movie is well animated and has a perfect length. People who really like cats or especially dogs might even give a few stars more, for example for the funny and cute video clips in the end of the movie.

Of course, this movie is just a sequel, it shows nothing innovating and the story is predictable and of course there are no twists in the movie, but you can't expect that from any animation movie a part of the amazing "Wall-E". Some people here say that you should put the children into the cinema to watch this movie and head yourself for the - in my opinion - heavily overrated "Inception" - I mean, you just can't compare those movies and if you take this point as a judgement, it is certain that you may be disappointed.

So, don't listen to some of those really ordinary and exaggerated hate comments and spend some ninety minutes with your kids or younger sister or girlfriend or cat/dog fetish, switch your brain off and enjoy the nice jokes and this very entertaining movie.

5,5 to 6 stars out of 10!

The children will really like this film, but the adults won't. So I advice you to go to the movie theaters as a family and your 4-12 years old go watch this film and you and our spouse or partner watch a more grown up film like Inception or if you have already seen Inception, then go watch Salt. However this isn't the worst film ever, or the worst film of Summer 2010, there are actually some funny and enjoyable moments in this film, however there aren't many of them at all. If it was consistently funny, I'd recommend it to the whole family or anyone looking for a good time.

This film is actually better than Marmaduke, but its still very dull and really not funny. It won't be a horrible experience watching this film, but it will be boring.

4/10