Should have been so much better

Huh. Okay.

Spoilers follow.

I kept waiting to laugh over the cat. And then suddenly I was at the end of the movie, squirming in discomfort and thankful that the bloody, barely-funny journey had ended. My takeaway impression was that the two main characters' lives had been pretty soundly destroyed and that the undercover female cop had been wholly complicit in letting that happen. It was a shame about Clarence's family missing out on having a husband and dad, but… I guess the movie thought that was okay, so maybe I should just let it go?

Aaaugh.

I appreciate--now that I've seen it--that the actual comedy was supposed to derive not from the relationship between humans and cats but from Key and Peele adopting different facades for different contexts. That could have been great, but the way the script explored it, it was rarely funny. The George Michael bits were amusing, but for this movie to work, Clarence needed to have a story that ended with him finding his true self. I *thought* that was going to happen when he slugged Spencer, but instead, seconds later, the movie shuffled him off to prison.

Like the wife in the early part of the film, I never found Clarence to be himself. Not once. I was rooting for him to find something that suited his spirit, but he never did. (Unless the movie wants me to believe he'd finally found his true self as the leader of the incarcerated gang members at the movie's end. And no: I refuse to believe that wasn't just one more shallow, painful joke at this struggling character's expense.) He was lost throughout the film.

This film wasn't awful, but if the writers had done a little more work on the story, it could have at least been good. Ah well.