At one point in "The Cat in the Hat," the Cat, played by Mike Myers, is mistaken for a pinata by a group of children at a birthday party. One by one, they line up to smack him, and the scene culminates with a husky lad swinging a baseball bat directly into the unfortunate feline's cojones.
That's a remarkably precise metaphor for what this movie does to the memory of Dr. Seuss. If the producers had dug up Ted Geisel's body and hung it from a tree, they couldn't have desecrated the man more.
The big-screen "Cat" represents everything corrupt, bloated, and wrong with mainstream Hollywood movies. It takes a slender toddler-classic about the joys of anarchy -- a 10-minute bedtime read at best -- and pumps it into 73 minutes of state-of-the-art vulgarity. It lets a pampered star get away with doing Austin Powers in a funny suit. It substitutes belches, farts, and splattery computer-generated effects for the good doctor's low-tech whimsy, and it makes sure there's enough product placement and soundtrack tie-ins to profitably extend the franchise well into next year.
This isn't about adapting a book, in other words -- it's about leveraging a brand.
So was 2000's "Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas," from the same producers, and that was a massive hit. It was also a soulless, clanky affair, proof positive that a movie doesn't have to be any good to make gazillions. "Cat in the Hat" is an improvement only because it doesn't sell out Christmas in the bargain. It just sells out Dr. Seuss.
Your hopes may rise during the movie's early going. The opening credits retain the blue, red, and white of the book's color scheme, and the town of Anville has a pastel suburban goofiness that's effectively Seussian -- think a kinder, gentler Tim Burton. As the two children at the center of the maelstrom, Dakota Fanning (Sally) and Spencer Breslin (Conrad) are likable and specific: She's a neatnik, he can't walk through a room without reducing it to a shambles.
Kelly Preston makes a perky, put-upon single mom, right down to the polka-dot dress in the closet, but it's in the supporting roles that things start to go terribly wrong. Sean Hayes plays mom's boss as a germophobic buffoon, Amy Hill turns baby sitter Mrs. Kwan into a breathtakingly racist caricature, and while Alec Baldwin has a high old time as a preening neighbor with romantic designs on Preston, he's just a "Home Alone"-style bad guy shoehorned into the wrong movie. Dr. Seuss never wrote unredeemable villains into his books, of course, but I guess we should thank the studio focus-group brains for straightening him out.