Nine Lives

In a fluff-ball feline comedy, workaholic billionaire Kevin Spacey buys his daughter a cat as a last-minute birthday gift and fate intervenes so that his spirit becomes trapped inside it. Enigmatic cat-whisperer Christopher Walken has quite a bit to do with it as the owner of a somewhat spooky pet shop and while Spacey's body remains in a coma in hospital, the family bonds with their new pet. Of course, being unable to tell them who really he is, he acts out in all sorts of cranky ways and inevitably, the mishaps lead this errant dad to realise that he should be paying his kids more attention. After an opening-credits sequence of internet cat videos, the laughs are rare and thereafter, the story plods. The digital effects, delivering sundry impossible feline feats, also prove an awkward match with the various very real-life moggies that fill out the central role. And they're all hypoallergenic Siberians incidentally, since director Barry Sonnenfeld (who also made the Men in Black films) is, yes, allergic to cats.