Maybe Nine Lives was recently discovered in a time capsule from 2000. Maybe it started off as an arch parody in the Wet Hot American Summer vein and things got out of control. Maybe there’s some complicated tax loophole for joint French-Chinese co-productions that EuropaCorp and Fundamental Films are exploiting, like Uwe Boll back in the day. Or maybe there’s a legion of nice little old ladies who collectively own 5,000 percent of Nine Lives’ profits. There has to be some reasonable explanation for what two-time Academy Award winner Kevin Spacey, Academy Award winner Christopher Walken and Golden Globe winner Jennifer Garner are doing in this movie, because it’s hard to accept Nine Lives at face value.
It looks like the trailer for a movie that you’d see in another movie, one where Kevin Spacey plays an actor who’s sold out and cries into his whiskey in an empty apartment while watching this on his expensive television. The film, directed by Barry Sonnenfeld, has the kind of artificial high-concept tropes that haven’t been seen on screen since Click a decade ago, which, come to think of it, also had Christopher Walken.* There’s the arbitrary ticking clock: Kevin Spacey has one week, for some reason, to learn a valuable lesson about his family. There’s the supernatural element: He has to learn this lesson while he’s been turned into a cat. (Why Walken does this instead of just, say, taking his money is one of the trailer’s mysteries.) And there’s the weirdly hateful protagonist: As the gilded age rolls on, have audiences ever been more ready to sympathize with the family problems of a real estate tycoon? (More of us than ever are learning what cat food tastes like, so that part’s relatable, but still.)
The whole thing is inexplicable, and the IMDb page is even stranger: One of the film’s credited actors is not so much an actor as an animated cat, the star of an iOS app created by a studio headquartered in the Russian tax haven of Cyprus. The trailer for Nine Lives may not build much excitement for the movie, but someday it’s gonna make for one hell of an oral history.
*Correction, April 18, 2016: This post originally misspelled Barry Sonnenfeld’s last name.
