MovieChat Forums > 8 Minutes Idle (2014) Discussion > What’s Utterly Vile? Killing a Cat for C...

What’s Utterly Vile? Killing a Cat for Comedy (spoilers, obviously)


…although since this so-called “comedy” is nothing but spoiled goods anyway, revealing it’s most vile plot point may help others avoid wasting their time on this worthless stinker of a film.

I thought I didn’t much like our protagonist Dan (Tom Hughes, wooden) for most of this movie – he’s dull, self-centred, selfish, cowardly, and dead behind the eyes – so his loathsome lack of responsibility in failing to secure adequate temporary accommodation for his lovely ginger tom cat John during his own temporary homelessness crisis just made me actively despise him. But when it turns out that the main reason for his dumping his supposedly belovéd puss in an office ceiling crawlspace is so that John can later turn up dead, choked to death on one of Dan’s discarded used condoms – y’know, for a laugh, like, yeah? – then despising the whole of this god-awful film became very real for me.

Sure, it’s only make believe, and sure – despite the lack of any such assurance in the closing credits – it’s likely that no animals were actively harmed in the making of this p¡ss-poor drek; but there’re many good reasons why humankind has co-evolved with domesticated cats for 10 millennia, to the point where cats are the most popular of our companion animals globally – one of which is our collective (but not ubiquitous) love and respect for our feline friends. So the fact that these film makers think killing a cat for a cheap laugh in their dreary rom com is ethically acceptable marks them out as morally reprehensible, among folks with a species-inclusive moral compass.

‘8 Minutes Idle’: unfunny, unlikeable, unforgivable – certainly not worth 86 minutes of anybody’s time.

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