Movie Review: That Darn Cat (1997)
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What Parents Should Know
Parents should know that, depspite its PG rating, the movie
is pretty innocuous. There are some cartoonish car chases,
crashes, and explosions.
Families who watch this movie may want to talk about the stereotypical characters here. Do Patti, her parents -- or anyone else -- seem like real people you know? What do you think the filmmaker made them so exaggerated? Kids who like this movie may want to compare and contrast it with the original.
Common Sense Media Review
The premise is cute, but the frenetic and strident execution
lacks charm, and the movie is murkily photographed to boot.
Slightly darker and more sinister than the 1965 Disney classic,
this version is watchable but obviously designed to appeal to
cynical modern teens. But guess what? Modern teens know
undistinguished fluff when they see it.
Bored with her quiet hometown, Patti Randall ( Casper's Christina Ricci) is stirred to action when her cat D.C. finds a clue to a kidnapping of a millionaire couple's (Dean Jones and Dyan Cannon) housekeeper. Unable to persuade the local police, Patti goes to Boston and convinces FBI agent Zeke Kelso (Doug E. Doug) to investigate.
In order to solve the case, Patti and Zeke follow D.C., but one disastrous misadventure follows another, including the wrongful arrest of Patti's father. D.C. eventually leads Patti to the abducted housekeeper, where she too is captured by the kidnappers. Zeke tracks Patti down and frees her. After a wild high-speed car chase through town, Zeke nabs the crooks.
The good news about this remake is that it's almost thirty minutes shorter than the original, and Christina Ricci is very likable in the Hayley Mills role. Comic actor Doug E. Doug ("Cosby") steps nicely into the shoes of the fumbling FBI agent originally played by Dean Jones, who, in a cute touch, appears in a different role here.
The bad news is that this updated version tries too hard to distance itself from the squeaky-clean, idealized Disney universe of the past, setting the story in a cozy, sanitized suburb and then ridiculing it. In the very first scene, Patti is shown in school reading a paper she wrote about how much life in her dullsville town "sucks." She's presented as Hollywood's cliched idea of a modern teen: sarcastic, depressed, always dressed in black. Her mother is depicted stereotypically as shallow and old-fashioned.
The comedy is fairly unsubtle and the story mostly played for cheap laughs involving the local yokels (their secret lives exposed during D.C.'s nocturnal wanderings), which tend to take the focus away from Patti and Zeke's investigation. The kidnapping plot, which was treated humorously but convincingly in the original, is just a big joke here: the housekeeper's employers are shown to be vain, plastic surgery-obsessed caricatures, while the kidnappers themselves are revealed to be the kindly old couple who own the local ice cream parlor.
Still, unlike many contemporary family movies, this one's
not mean-spirited and makes for perfectly pleasant viewing for
kids who won't watch "old" movies -- even though the original
That
Darn Cat
is far more entertaining.
Common Sense Media is a nonprofit organization dedicated to providing information to help parents make media and entertainment choices for their families.
