| Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore | |
|---|---|
Theatrical release poster |
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| Directed by | Brad Peyton |
| Produced by | Polly Cohen Andrew Lazar Greg Michael Brent O'Connor |
| Screenplay by | Ron J. Friedman |
| Story by | Steve Bencich |
| Based on | Characters by John Requa Glenn Ficarra |
| Starring | James Marsden Nick Nolte Christina Applegate Katt Williams Bette Midler Neil Patrick Harris Chris O'Donnell Jack McBrayer |
| Music by | Christopher Lennertz Theme song: Shirley Bassey |
| Cinematography | Steven Poster |
| Editing by | Julie Rogers |
| Studio | Village Roadshow Pictures |
| Distributed by | Warner Bros. |
| Release date(s) | July 30, 2010 |
| Running time | 82 minutes |
| Country | United States Australia |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $85,000,000[1] |
| Box office | $112,483,764 |
Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore is a 2010 family action comedy film directed by Brad Peyton. The film stars Chris O'Donnell and Jack McBrayer. The film also stars the voices of James Marsden, Nick Nolte, Christina Applegate, Katt Williams, Bette Midler, and Neil Patrick Harris. The film is a sequel to 2001's Cats & Dogs (despite the opening credits stating otherwise; saying the film is "based on characters" from the first film). The film was released on July 30, 2010. The film was critically panned, but was a modest commercial success, grossing over $110 million worldwide.
Contents |
At a satellite base in Northern Germany, a worker named Friedrich (Fred Armisen), delivering secret codes finds a Cocker Spaniel puppy outside his office. He brings the puppy inside, showing her to his Bloodhound, Rex. Rex senses something is wrong with the puppy and starts to bark at her, making the worker take him outside. Both are locked out of the office. Rex looks in the window seeing the puppy taking pictures of the top secret documents and later revealing to be Kitty Galore (voiced by Bette Midler), an evil female hairless cat. Rex turns out to be a dog agent and reports to HQ.
In San Francisco, Diggs (voiced by James Marsden), a German Shepherd police dog and his master, Shane (Chris O'Donnell) are called to a hostage situation at Crazy Carlito's used car lot. Diggs deliberately ignores Shane's commands, attacking Crazy Carlito (Paul Rodriguez) and causing him to release a device that Diggs grabs which causes the car lot office to blow up. Butch, an Anatolian Shepherd, (voiced by Nick Nolte) and Lou, the Beagle chief incharge of Dog HQ, (voiced by Neil Patrick Harris) are watching a footage of the incident. Lou, no longer a field agent having been promoted to official level hence being termed "desk jockey" by Butch, wants Diggs to be an agent with Butch as his mentor (to his reluctance) to help bring down Kitty Galore.
At the police station, Diggs is suspended and sent back into the kennels. Shane wants to adopt Diggs but the police will not allow it. Shane promises Diggs that he will get him out and he also tells Diggs that that life is not about being top dog and he must learn to work with other people and listen to other people. Butch comes out of the floor of the kennel and recruits Diggs and takes him to D.O.G. HQ in a rocket. Lou shows them a video they received three hours ago. The video happens to be from Kitty Galore. In the video, she explains that she is going to broadcast a sound (she calls it the "Call of the Wild") that will drive all dogs completely insane all around the world, and without the dogs to protect the humans, she will enslave all mankind. Lou explains that Kitty has been trying to track down a stool pigeon named Seamus (voiced by Katt Williams), and that if they find Seamus, he can lead them to Kitty. Lou sends them on a mission to find Seamus and stop Kitty from broadcasting her "Call of the Wild".
After tracking down Seamus, Diggs and Butch meet a M.E.O.W.S. (Mousers Enforcing Our World's Safety) agent named Catherine (voiced by Christina Applegate) who was after Seamus -who had broken his right wing during her pursuit of him- for the same reason the dogs were. She reveals that Kitty Galore was once an agent named Ivana Clawyu who worked for M.E.O.W.S. until about a year before the events of the film; Ivana was on a mission at a cosmetics factory during which a guard dog chased her into a vat of hair removal cream causing her to lose all her fur and give her the appearance of a Sphynx cat. Unrecognizable and humiliated by her fellow agents, she left M.E.O.W.S. to return to her human home at Christmas, but unfortunately was kicked out. Since then, Ivana went rogue, changing her name to Kitty Galore and has been plotting her revenge, not only on dogs, but cats and humans as well (Catherine reveals that contrary to the dogs' beliefs, not all cats are evil and some care about humans just as much as dogs do).
After bringing Catherine to HQ, Lou is contacted by Tab Lazenby (voiced by Roger Moore), the "fat cat" of M.E.O.W.S and they form an alliance to take down Kitty Galore. Seamus reveals where his cousin Nicky was going while working for Kitty. At a cat lady's home, they discover the middlecat (who is actually Calico), who activates a death trap which floods the room they are in with kitty litter (forgetting that he himself is inside). After escaping the flood, Calico tells them that he has been sending the parts to Kitty, who had stolen technology from various US establishments such as NASA, the Pentagon and even Microsoft, using other pigeons that work for her but claims that he does not know where she is hiding.
Needing help to find out where Kitty could be hiding, they go see Mr. Tinkles (voiced by Sean Hayes) who is locked up, in a similar fashion as Hannibal Lecter in Silence of the Lambs, at a hidden prison on Alcatraz Island (he was presumably sent there from developing insanity from his torturous time with Mr. Mason' s maid and her sisters since the events of the first film). Although he refuses to help them fight Kitty (mentioning the risk of being blackballed if he did so), he gives a hint to the group that "a cat's eye reveals everything" and that he is planning his escape. Kitty discovers through an informant at the prison that the cats and dogs are working together and sends two Scottish orange tabby cat mercenaries named Angus and Duncan MacDougall (voiced by Michael Beattie and Jeff Bennett respectively) to attack them and capture (and possibly assassinate) Seamus on the boat returning from the prison. The MacDougall twins attack Butch, Catherine, Diggs and Seamus on the boat, Butch managing to send Duncan overboard. Diggs hangs Angus on a flag pole, and is about to fling the tabby away. Butch tells Diggs not to do it, but Diggs does not listen.
After getting fed up with Diggs not listening to his commands (letting a carrier pigeon lead get away, almost getting the team drowned in Calico's kitty litter death trap and letting the MacDougall twins escape), Butch votes him off the team and leaves with Seamus to the pigeon's home to find clues. Catherine then takes Diggs to her home where he meets her nieces who tickle his tummy. Catherine learns that Diggs has been in and out of kennels his whole life due to the fact he never trusted anybody (he also never trusted Shane, and never trusted his superior officers) but himself. She takes him to the M.E.O.W.S. HQ, and Diggs, Catherine and Tab learn that Kitty is hiding at a fairground with her new master, a magician named Chuck the Magnificent (Jack McBrayer), from a still picture from her video - by looking in the eyes like Tinkles said.
Not long after arriving at the fairground, Diggs and Catherine are captured by Kitty Galore and Paws, Kitty's assistant. Meanwhile, Butch (who begins to feel he was too hard on Diggs when he dismissed him even though he made the right choice of dismissing Diggs) discovers blueprints for a giant satellite dish in Seamus' home (this was why Kitty was after Seamus, his cousin stashed the blueprints there and Seamus used them as wallpaper). Back at the fairground, Kitty reveals to Diggs and Catherine that she plans to send the "Call of the Wild" via an orbiting satellite, which only dogs can hear through televisions, radios and cell phones to cause them to act hostile towards their humans. They will then be put in the kennels where they will spend the rest of their lives neglected. After escaping Kitty's death trap, Diggs and Catherine meet up with Butch and Seamus who were alerted by Tab and Lou.
Kitty uses the roof of the flying swings ride as the satellite dish to transmit the signal. Butch, Diggs, Seamus and Catherine reach the roof of the flying swings via Butch's jetpack. They see a red button, thinking it's the shut down button. They form a dog-cat pyramid to reach the red button, but fail. Seamus -with his right wing fully healed by this time- flies up to the button and presses it, but it is revealed that it is the button to start the satellite. Diggs tells Butch that if he goes up to some wires on the satellite, he can probably pull them off and shut down the satellite. Diggs brings Catherine along, and the two get to the wires. Kitty orders Paws to attack them, whereupon Paws is revealed to be a Terminator-esque robot.
However it is already too late, the Call of the Wild fires and dogs in Europe (London) and the majority of North America (New York and Albuquerque) start becoming hostile in their homes, leaving less than a minute before the signal hits San Francisco. Diggs goes to the wires but he cannot break them. He encounters Paws, who starts biting metal objects to get to Diggs. Diggs tricks Paws into biting one of the wires causing himself, and the satellite to explode in the nick of time. The humans watching think it is a stunt by the magician, who tried to climb onto the roof to get Kitty Galore down. When her pet mouse Scrumptious turns on her as payback for all the abuse he suffered throughout the film, Kitty ends up getting ejected from the satellite dish as it explodes in a flurry of fireworks, tied up in cotton candy and lands right in the magician's hat. When Chuck says to Kitty that they are now famous, she cries in both disbelief and defeat.
After the mission, Diggs goes to live with Shane, who has been looking for Diggs since he escaped from the police kennel. Diggs is called to HQ and is shown a live video revealing that Mr. Tinkles has escaped from prison with Calico (voiced by Wallace Shawn). In the film's cliffhanger ending, it is shown that Diggs, Butch, Catherine, and Seamus are still working together and they get ready to go after Mr. Tinkles.
In a post-credits scene, Mr. Tinkles tries to order a deworming cream and, realizing the camera is still on, he says "Cats Rule!, Yeah".
Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore has received mostly negative reviews from critics. Review aggregate Rotten Tomatoes reports that 13% of critics have given the film a positive review based on 79 reviews, with an average score of 3.6/10.[2] The critical consensus is: "Dull and unfunny, this inexplicable sequel offers little more than the spectacle of digitally rendered talking animals with celebrity voices."[2] Among Rotten Tomatoes' Cream of the Crop, which consists of popular and notable critics from the top newspapers, websites, television, and radio programs, the film holds an overall approval rating of 35% based on 17 reviews.[3] Another review aggregate, Metacritic, calculated a score of 30 based on 19 reviews.[4]
Joe Leydon of Variety wrote a positive-leaning review towards the film which reads "Nine years after Cats & Dogs fetched more than $200 million worldwide with its comic take on interspecies animosity, Warners is unleashing Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore, a faster, funnier follow-up in which CGI-enhanced canines and felines effect a temporary truce to combat a common enemy."[5] Critics cited the plot as recycled. Scott Tobias of The A.V. Club negatively reviewed the film's plot saying "it’s still about a feline plot for world domination, and the slobbering secret agents who stand in the way. And it’s still, in the spirit of the original film, an unbelievable piece of shit."[6]
The film was nominated for a Razzie for "Worst Eye-Gouging Misuse of 3D", but lost to The Last Airbender.
The film earned $4,225,000 on opening day, and $12,279,363 on its opening weekend reaching #5 at the box office and having a $3,314 average from a very wide 3,705 theaters. In its second weekend, its drop was very similar to the first film, retreating 44% to $6,902,116 to seventh place and lifting its total to $26,428,266 in two weeks. It held better in its third weekend, dropping 39% to $4,190,426 and remaining in the Top 10. The film closed on October 21, 2010 after 84 days of release, earning $43,585,753 domestically. Produced on an $85 million budget, the film is considered a huge box office bomb, as it grossed less than half of the first Cats & Dogs, but, it did manage to do better business than fellow summer talking animal competition Marmaduke. It earned an additional $69 million overseas for a worldwide total of $112.5 million, which makes it a modest box office success.
During its initial American theatre release, the film was preceded by the new 3D animated short film titled "Coyote Falls" with Looney Tunes' Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner.[7]
| Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore Soundtrack | |
|---|---|
| Soundtrack album by Various Artists | |
| Released | July 27, 2010 |
| Length | 34:56 |
| Label | WaterTower Music |
| Track listing | |||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| No. | Title | Artist | Length | ||||||
| 1. | "Get the Party Started" | Dame Shirley Bassey | 3:59 | ||||||
| 2. | "Why Can't We Be Friends" | Sean Kingston feat. Jasmine V | 4:19 | ||||||
| 3. | "Bad to the Bone" | George Thorogood | 4:50 | ||||||
| 4. | "Eye of the Tiger" | Spectacular! Cast | 3:32 | ||||||
| 5. | "Born to Be Wild" | Alana Dee | 3:01 | ||||||
| 6. | "Friend" | Ziggy Marley | 2:53 | ||||||
| 7. | "Magic Carpet Ride" | KSM | 2:57 | ||||||
| 8. | "Atomic Dog" | The DeeKompressors | 2:08 | ||||||
| 9. | "Get Together" | The Youngbloods | 4:37 | ||||||
| 10. | "Concerto for Claws & Orchestra" | Christopher Lennertz | 2:40 | ||||||
A video game, developed by 505 Games, was released on July 20, 2010 for the Nintendo DS. It is titled Cats and Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore after the movie with the same name.[9]
The Blu-ray, 3D Blu-ray, and DVD copies of Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore was released on November 16, 2010.[10]