Mister Fuzzypants and Christopher Walken (EuropaCorp)
Cold openings are never a good sign. In a week when the most anticipated movie opening also seems to be the most reviled, the latest from Men in Black director Barry Sonnenfeld wasn’t even screened for critics. The prospect of Kevin Spacey as a talking cat seems like the most desperate of cinematic measures. Yet I am a sucker for talking animal movies about becoming more human, and Nine Lives is one of the finer examples of this much-maligned genre.
We meet megalomaniac businessman Tom Brand (Kevin Spacey) in a private plane as he prepares to parachute down to the roof of the New York office tower that he expects to be the tallest in the Northern Hemishphere. Unfortunately, board member Ian Cox (Mark Consuelos) has sabotaged the penis envy party: a planned Chicago skyscraper will come in 60 feet higher than Tom’s folly.
Tom ignores phone calls from his wife (Jennifer Garner) and isn’t much good to his daughter Rebecca (Melina Weissman). The girl is about to celebrate her 11th birthday, and daddy has showered her with expensive gifts but given little of what she wants most: a dad.
And a cat. Tom hates cats, but his company board, particularly his son David (Robbie Amell), encourages him to get his daughter what she wants. By chance, Tom’s GPS guides him to an obscure downtown alley where Felix Perkins (Christopher Walken) presides over Purrkins Pet Shop, and thus is set in motion the magical turn of events wherein Tom’s comatose body lays in the hospital while his mind inhabits the cat Mister Fuzzypants.
The set-up may be familiar to talking animal movie connoisseurs, borrowed from a variety of scenarios that include the low-budget straight-to-video comedy Quigley, which starred Gary Busey as a selfish businessman who dies and comes back as a dog. But Sonnenfeld taps a far more ancient source: this Icarus with whiskers fights to scrape the sky, and hubris dooms him to the level of an animal.
If you’ve seen other talking animal movies, you know what’s going to happen: Tom, reduced to an animal, learns how to become more human. This isn’t comedy, but tragedy, with the inevitable option of a comeuppance redeemed.
Spacey was once a menacing figure in cinema, and if this role seems like part of a continued fall from grace, he’s fine as the film’s tragic hero. Walken, who would barely need makeup to play a cat himself, mostly dispenses with his signature dramatic-pause schtick and is a convincing interlocutor between the human and animal world. Purrkins Pet Shop looks like something out of Men in Black, and Nine Lives is essentially a lite version, aliens replaced with furry felines (including a cameo from Lil Bub).
Despite the seemingly bargain-basement concept, the predictable film is well-conceived and designed. Vinyl junkies will love the details in Felix’s shop, with a counter that features a revolving selection of cat-themed albums, from Ted Nugent, Jimmy Smith and even proto-Little Richard Esquerita.
Even the seemingly deadly office setting reveals clever art direction.The egotistical Tom has his red logo plastered all over the office, and from red binders to red insignias on storage boxes, the film is visually unified by this colorful danger sign. The color gets put on the back burner as Tom is sentenced to his whiskered purgatory, but it comes back as he learns to make sacrifices. Isn’t red also the color of the heart? Nine Lives isn’t purrfect, but it will warm the heart of anyone who isn’t allergic to its charms.
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Nine Lives
Directed by Barry Sonnenfeld
Written by Matt Allen, Dan Antoniazzi, Gwyn Lurie, Ben Shiffrin, and Caleb Wilson
With Kevin Spacey, Christopher Walken, Jennifer Garner
Rated PG. Contains potty humor and strong language.
87 minutes
Opens today at a theatre near you.
