“Cats & Dogs”

Cats & Dogs, a 2001 film starring Jeff Goldblum and Tobey Maguire, is a movie about the ongoing war between — you guessed it — cats and dogs.

This movie was a go-to film in my household when I was a kid. It was a completely harmless movie that both my sister and I could be entertained by for an hour and a half while my parents could relax on the couch. My sister thoroughly enjoyed all the scenes of the pets acting cute and furry while I enjoyed the villainous humor of the main bad guy, a cat named Mr. Tinkles.

The premise of the movie is that both species of animal have secret agents who battle each other in the shadows, unbeknownst to humans. The main character, a dog named Lou, is adopted into a house and is hastily swept up into the dog secret agency to fight against the cats, which progresses into a typical, “You need to save the world from some evil device,” plot.

While it wasn’t necessarily my favorite thing to watch, I remembered it fondly as I looked back on my childhood years, but upon a recent viewing, the truth was uncovered.

This movie is incomprehensibly stupid.

The CG is terrible and does not hold up well with age, the plot is stale and uninteresting and the dialogue is cheesy and becomes annoying after the first 15 minutes or so. The one thing you can say, though, is that the actors at least tried to bring it to life, even if it didn’t work.

This is a movie that’s perfect to play for a toddler, and that’s about it. Everyone else should proceed with caution.

Mr. Tinkles’ Introduction