On paper, Mad Cats is incredibly promising. It’s got a classic B-movie setup, the promise of pulpy action, and a zippy runtime, but it’s never quite the sum of its parts. Instead, Mad Cats doesn’t lean enough into what makes it unique, and ends up feeling devoid of identity.
Mad Cats follows Taka (Shô Mineo), a down-on-his-luck drifter living out of a mobile home that he’s about to lose. His life changes one day when his landlady appears with a mysterious tape, in which he learns that his brother, a scientist, has been kidnapped. What follows is a quest to save him from the clutches of a coven of humans embodied with the characteristics and behaviour of cats. Yep.
It’s a knowingly brazen concept, and in its early sequences, Mad Cats is nice and silly. The MacGuffin that the baddies are after is a box of ancient, ultra-powerful catnip, and driving sequences are set against painfully creaky green-screens with film grain, distortion, and constant shifts in focus. It’s knowingly stupid and light in its tone, which makes it easier to swallow the bizarre concept. In fact, at this point your main critique will be that the eponymous cats aren’t human-feline hybrids.
As it goes on, though, Mad Cats becomes more by-the-numbers and significantly less engaging. Taka’s is the typical hero’s journey without anything especially unique to spice it up. He undertakes training from a stolid but endearing mentor, becomes braver as we gear up to the main conflict, and deviates completely from the nomad we initially meet.
It’s not helped that the two other main characters – a vagabond named Takezo (Yûya Matsuura) and silent warrior Ayane (Nozomi Hanayagi) – are underwritten caricatures that are nowhere near compelling enough to make you feel invested in the trite moments of interpersonal drama.
In fact, Takezo is the best character here – the most engaging performance and the one who changes the most through the course of the film. Sadly, as soon his background or any further emotional depth are hinted at, the film eschews it and in the very next scene, it’s like nothing at all had happened.
This is the story of Mad Cats, really – missed opportunity and a failure to realise what makes it unique. My initial thought was that it’ll live or die by the quality of its setup and how good its action is, and that unfortunately rang true to the film’s detriment. The fight scenes should’ve been grisly, silly, and packed with flair, but they’re instead forgettable, weirdly vacuous, and disengaging.
And what about the coven of cat-like humans vying for a centuries-old box of violence-inducing catnip? You’ll never find out who they are, how all of this happened, and how their organisation works. It’s just another example of direction that seems to miss what gives the premise legs, instead pivoting towards the well-trodden path of trite heroes, floaty action, and completely empty characters.
Mad Cats just never really amounts to anything, instead hitting every beat just as you’d expect it. Predictability is arguably the worst trait that a film with such a zany concept can have, and sadly it’s there in bucketloads. On paper it sounds good, but in practice, Mad Cats misses the mark.
★½
Mad Cats is out now on DVD and Blu-ray from Third Window Films.
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