I saw Cats and this is the great joy of watching a Christmas turkey

Critics can be wrong, but this time they are bang on the money. But like a car crash, I was drawn to the cinema to watch director Tom Hooper’s heroic epic fail

There’s something about a crash that draws people. Having been the unwitting star of a real life one I can testify to that.

That fact might, might, just mitigate the losses that Universal Studios is going to take from Cats, which is shaping up to be an all-time Christmas turkey.

I have to admit it’s what drew me to the film. Had it received mixed, even moderately good reviews, I’d have cheerfully avoided it unless it was my turn to “take one for the team” and accompany my daughter who is inexplicably fond of this sort of thing.

But the sheer scale of the critical assault, the poison that has been sprayed by the sharpest of sharpened quills, piqued my curiosity. Could it really be that bad?

There are, of course, bad movies released every week. Some of them feature talented actors. Recall that Judi Dench was in The Chronicles of Riddick, a 29 per cent Rotten Tomatoes stinker that still beat Cats. I like cult movies and sci-fi. It’s probably why the Cats trailer that scared the crap out of people didn’t overly concern me. But Riddick held scant appeal. Still, there’s nothing wrong with getting paid.

Cats, however, is not just an every day duffer like that. It’s an heroic, epic fail, that I wouldn’t be surprised to see among the Razzies when the nominations are announced.

Sometimes movie critics are wildly out of step with the public they serve. Just how out of step can be seen by some of lists of best films they like to produce, which regularly feature pictures only a small percentage of the cinema-going public have even heard of, let alone seen.

On this occasion, dear reader, they’re bang on. At points, such as the crude joke about neutering or the wildly inappropriate dance performed by Rebel Wilson, considering the U certificate, I was left cringing with embarrassment. Both of them mercifully passed over my daughter’s head, as the British Board of Film Classification said it thought they probably would in justifying its rating.

Movies can be reassessed. The Night of the Hunter, a Fifties noir, was judged harshly on its release and failed at the box office. Its maker Charles Laughton never directed again. The work has since been preserved in the US Library of Congress as “culturally, aesthetically or historically significant” and regularly appears in best of all time lists.

That ain’t going to happen with Cats. The best it can hope for is that it becomes one of those cult bad movies like Showgirls or Plan Nine from Outer Space that get screened late on a Friday or Saturday night after the pubs have closed.

I nonetheless came out of it feeling a certain sympathy for those involved because Cats isn’t a picture that was slapped together solely for the purposes of making a cheap buck or two out of an uncritical audience. It is a film that has clearly had love as well as money pumped into it (the production budget was apparently $100m and the standard rule is that you add at least the same again for marketing and promotion, etc).

It boasts a dazzling line-up. In addition to Wilson, and Dench, there’s Ian McKellan. Gandalf no less. There’s Idris Elba, the coolest man on the planet. There’s Taylor Swift, perhaps the biggest star on the planet. There’s Jennifer Hudson, who won an Oscar for Dreamgirls, her first movie musical. Dench also has one of those too, as does director Tom Hooper for The King’s Speech.

That, and the sheer scale of its failure, the fact that just about every choice the makers made was wrong (the constantly moving CGI tails, the shapeless rug Dench, a national treasure, appears to be wearing, the bits that will make parents shudder), serve a strange sort of purpose.

Yes, there’s an element of schadenfreude at work, but there’s some comfort to be had from the realisation that even people with such awesome, godlike talent, are human after all and thus capable of making the occasional misstep, suffering through a metaphorical bad day at the office.

And if they need some consolation, well my daughter loved it, even putting it in her top ten of all time. The FT was also a fan. Sometimes there’s just no accounting for taste.