I'll grant you, I knew "Dr. Seuss' the Cat in the Hat" was going to be bad going in. However, it was free on HBO and we had nothing else to do so we watched it. Why we watched the whole thing I'll never know, but I think I can now officially classify it as the Worst Movie Ever.
Previously, "Battlefield Earth" held that title.
The main problems were that the movie wasn't funny, and that you didn't care about the characters. Fairly difficult problems to overcome, I'd say. Directed by Bo Welch, whose best work has been done as a production designer (Men in Black, Edward Scissorhands, Ghostbusters, Beetlejuice) this movie was a disaster from the beginning.
The basic premise is that the mom is dating a jerk, and she is having a business party "meet & greet" at her house that evening. Her boss, who has some obsessive-compulsive disorder issues, has informed her she will be fired if her house isn't immaculate.
Her two children are Conrad, who always does the opposite of what he's told, and Sally, who is a control freak. The boyfriend wants to send Conrad to military school, and I can't help but agree with him. The boy needs to be spanked, or something. He spends the first few minutes of the movie preparing a "staircase luge" outfit out of food and other kitchen items. Instead of taking what he needs, he simply dumps out whole drawers on the floor, etc. The boy is something like 11 or 12 years old. Has he got some kind of mental deficiency? I can see a even an 8 year old making a mess on accident , but for us to believe he is so dimwitted as to simply throw things on the floor pell-mell is more than the audience can go with.
The Cat is played by Mike Meyers. I like Mike Meyers. I really like him. He's very funny. He's been funny in many of the movies he's been in. I will usually go see a movie he has been in just because he is in it. Even Austin Powers 3, which was nothing but poop jokes. He was not so great in this movie. He wasn't funny, and I'm not sure that it was his fault entirely. The script was just bad.
Dr. Suess is about the poetry and this silliness, and it's for children. The dialogue given to Mike Meyers was not that. There was very little rhyming, and much of the dialogue seemed almost...anachronistic. It simply wasn't Dr. Seuss. It was Mike Meyers trying really really hard to be funny. The Cat was almost a sinister figure who seemed almost to be there to torment the children, rather than teach a lesson. If we (the audience, not the children) had been told that the Cat was there to help them in some way, we might be able to get behind him. Instead, we are left with the feeling that the Cat also needed military school.
In short, it sucked. But I'm sure you knew that already.