Nine Lives

The mid-2010s was a strange, transitional pocket of time for the film industry. We were standing on the precipice of the streaming wars, yet the multiplex was still haunted by the ghosts of high-concept comedies that felt like they had been cryogenically frozen since 1997. Enter Nine Lives, a film that feels less like a theatrical release and more like a tax-shelter fever dream masquerading as a Saturday matinee. On paper, the pedigree is baffling. You have Barry Sonnenfeld, the man who gave us the sharp, stylized worlds of Get Shorty and Men in Black, directing a script about a billionaire who gets his soul shoved into a Himalayan cat named Mr. Fuzzypants.

I sat down to watch this while eating a slightly overripe nectarine that was drippy and difficult to manage, and honestly, the struggle to keep fruit juice off my shirt was significantly more tense than the film’s central conflict. There is something fundamentally surreal about seeing Kevin Spacey, at that specific point in his career, delivering lines through a CGI cat that looks like it was rendered on a discarded PlayStation 2 dev kit.

The Boardroom vs. The Litter Box

The plot follows Tom Brand (Kevin Spacey), a workaholic billionaire obsessed with building the tallest skyscraper in the Northern Hemisphere. He’s the kind of guy who misses his daughter’s birthday because he’s too busy being "visionary," which in 2016 cinema language meant "being a jerk in a tailored suit." When he finally decides to buy a cat for his daughter, Rebecca (Malina Weissman), a freak accident during a lightning storm on a rooftop leads to his consciousness being swapped with the feline’s.

What follows is a bizarre cocktail of physical comedy and corporate intrigue. While Tom-the-cat is at home trying to communicate with his wife Lara (Jennifer Garner) by splashing Scotch on a rug, his adult son David (Robbie Amell) is fighting off a corporate takeover by the conniving Ian Cox (Mark Consuelos). The tonal whiplash is enough to give you permanent neck damage. One minute you’re watching a cat get drunk on expensive liquor, and the next you’re embroiled in a subplot about debt-to-equity ratios and skyscraper construction permits.

Jennifer Garner does her absolute best with a role that mostly requires her to look confused at a pet, and her sincerity is the only thing keeping the movie from drifting entirely into the ether. She brings a grounded warmth that the rest of the film—which is essentially a live-action cartoon—doesn't quite know what to do with.

A Relic of a Different Era

Watching Nine Lives now, it functions as a fascinating artifact of the "Besson-produced" era of mid-budget filmmaking. Luc Besson’s EuropaCorp was trying to crack the American family market with the same efficiency they used for the Taken franchise, but the "soul-swapping pet" trope was already exhausted by the time The Shaggy Dog hit theaters a decade prior.

The visual effects are the most glaring sign of the film's identity crisis. In an era where The Jungle Book (released the same year) was pushing the boundaries of photorealistic animals, the cat in Nine Lives oscillates between a real, very bored-looking animal and a digital double that defies the laws of physics and lighting. There’s a scene involving the cat attempting to open a bottle of 1962 Louis Roederer Cristal that is genuinely haunting—not because it’s funny, but because the physics of the cat’s movements feel like they were programmed by someone who had only ever seen a cat in a fever dream.

Despite the technical oddities, there’s a weirdly watchable quality to the supporting cast. Cheryl Hines pops up as Tom’s ex-wife, Madison, bringing a much-needed jolt of comedic energy, and Mark Consuelos leans into the villainy with a smirk that suggests he knew exactly what kind of movie he was in.

Why It Disappeared into the Litter Tray

So, how did a movie with this much talent end up as a footnote in a Wikipedia list of "Films with 0% on Rotten Tomatoes" (though it eventually clawed its way up to 11%)? Part of it is the sheer "uncanny valley" of it all. The comedy relies heavily on slapstick that feels dated—cats falling off things, cats peeing in designer bags—without the wit Sonnenfeld usually brings to his frames.

In the contemporary landscape of 2016, audiences were moving toward more sophisticated family fare like Zootopia or the emotional depth of Pixar’s Inside Out. Nine Lives felt like a regression, a "body swap" comedy that didn't have anything new to say about fatherhood or corporate greed. It exists in that strange space where it's too weird to be a classic, but too star-studded to be completely ignored. It’s a curiosity, a "what-if" from a director who usually has a much firmer grip on the tonal steering wheel.

The film is a bizarre time capsule of an era where $30 million could still be spent on a project that feels like a high-budget sitcom pilot. While it’s far from a masterpiece, there’s a perverse joy in witnessing the sheer commitment of the cast to a premise this ridiculous. If you’re a fan of cinematic oddities or just want to see a cat try to use a smartphone, it’s a harmless way to spend eighty minutes, provided you don't go in expecting the next Addams Family. Just keep an eye on your nectarines while you watch.