Nine Lives (2016)

Barry Sonnenfeld has had an interesting career.  He came to fame as the cinematographer on movies such as Blood Simple, When Harry Met Sally…, and Big.  Then he decided to make some movies on his own.  Out of this new career path came some beloved films like the Men in Black trilogy and The Addams Family movies.  But there were some stinkers as well.  Though he found success when Will Smith fought aliens, Will Smith in a western setting versus a giant mechanical spider didn’t fare so well.  Wild Wild West is still considered a failure.  The movie I’m going to be covering this week was another failure for Sonnenfeld.

Nine Lives came out in 2016, which is just last year at the time of writing.  Nobody expected much, since the premise itself seemed dumb.  Kevin Spacey played Tom Brand, a man in charge of a company.  What the company did, I couldn’t tell you.  They had ties to so many things that it was impossible to nail down what they were about.  At the point when the movie takes place, the company was trying to construct the tallest building in North America.  Tom had a family but never took the time to appreciate them.  When he fell off of his own building, his conscience was transferred into a cat.  Living as a cat helped him to love his family and find out that he needed to care a little bit more.

Before I get into my thoughts on the movie itself, I want to discuss a theory I had when I first found out about it.  One of the key characters in Nine Lives was Felix Perkins, played by Christopher Walken.  The premise of the movie seemed like another movie in which Christopher Walken played a very similar role.  In Nine Lives, Felix Perkins sold Tom Brand the cat that he would become.  He was the catalyst for Tom learning how to appreciate his family.  This is similar to Click, a movie where Christopher Walken played Morty, a man with a universal remote that could control life.  Adam Sandler got the remote from Morty and learned how to appreciate his family when he fast forwarded through large portions of his life.  I hoped that there would be a connection between the two movies with the characters being the same, but there was no hint at them being the same person.  They just happened to function in the same role and were played by the same actor.

Watching Nine Lives was one of those experiences where it was clearly a bad movie but something kept my attention.  The movie had me hooked.  Perhaps it was because I wanted to see where it would go.  How insane could the movie possibly get?  It didn’t disappoint.  The movie got exceedingly more ludicrous as it went on, to the point that the climax made zero sense.  In fact, a lot of the stuff that happened as the movie reached its highest point of tension worked against what came after it.  There were reveals that couldn’t work because of what people had said or done, yet they were in the movie anyway.  One character said he was going to commit suicide, then jumped off a building with a parachute that he didn’t have on him before going to the building.  It wasn’t in the building either, since he had removed it earlier when he was “fired.”  A cat jumped off a building near the end of the movie and was alive by the end with no explanation given other than the cat gets nine lives.  The movie made no sense sometimes.

But the biggest standout for what made the movie bad was the effects work.  It was terrible.  When Tom Brand was the cat (yes, I get the joke of his name being Tom and him being a cat), he would do things that would take a real cat way too long to learn for the purposes of a silly kids movie.  CG came in handy, allowing the cat to do the things that needed to happen in the movie.  The problem is that the people behind the effects didn’t take the time to make the things look good, or even natural.  Everything was super fake looking.  It was Son of the Mask level animal effects.  It was like someone barfed a cat onto the screen and didn’t think to clean it up.

The only reason that Nine Lives would get a pass is that another talking cat movie was even worse, since it had zero effort put into it.  Nine Lives at least had some effort.  A movie that didn’t put in any effort was A Talking Cat!?!, which used a real cat but didn’t have it do anything.  When the cat talked, they would put a black circle over its mouth and have the circle expand and close as if it were a mouth.  No teeth.  No tongue.  Just the black hole of despair.  The acting was staler, the story was worse… Basically, it tried to do the kind of stuff that Nine Lives did, but worse.  That’s why Nine Lives will never be unwatchable.  It had noticeably better qualities than a similar movie.

Nine Lives is a bad movie, and a notable one for Barry Sonnenfeld.  It was noted by many people as one of the worst of 2016, and having seen it, I can understand why.  It is leagues above some of the stuff I’ve watched for this blog.  By mainstream standards, however, it is one of the worst wide release movies of last year.  That’s easy to see.  Nine Lives has already earned its place in movie history.  It will surely get a bigger following, like most bad movies.  I’d be okay with that.

I hope you’ll be okay with these notes:

• Son of the Mask and A Talking Cat!?! were both mentioned in this post.
• Nine Lives saw the fourth appearance of Jason Blicker in the Sunday “Bad” Movies.  He was in Iron Eagle II, Iron Eagle IV, and Bark Ranger.
• Mark Camacho had a role in Nine Lives.  He was previously in How the Toys Saved Christmas.
• Lara Brand was played by Jennifer Garner.  She was already in a Sunday “Bad” Movie called Valentine’s Day.
• Finally, Christopher Walken made his second Sunday “Bad” Movies appearance after recently debuting in Gigli.
• Have you seen Nine Lives?  Is it as bad as people say it is?  What did you think of it?  Share your thoughts in the comments section below.
• Suggestions for future movies are always welcome.  Share them in the comments or on my Twitter timeline.
• If you want to see clips of bad movies, clips of weird movie lists, or other random stuff, add me on snapchat.  My username is jurassicgriffin.
• Next week… What is next week?  Oh yeah, I have it paused right now.  Superfast! is coming up next week to line up with the release of The Fate of the Furious, better known as F8.  This is actually one of the better spoofs to come from the minds of Friedberg/Seltzer.  I enjoyed it the first time I saw it, and I’m enjoying it now.  I’ll write more about it for next week.  See you then.