I can't believe I'm saying this, but the talking animals do a better acting job than the movie's human contributors, Jeff Goldblum, Elizabeth Perkins and Alexander Pollock. The first two play the Brodys, while Pollock plays their son Scott. The three of them look like dinner theater players who were dragged off stage in the middle of a play and thrown into traffic. If only they had stuck computer-generated mouths on Goldblum and crew, the film might have actually been funny.

Naturally, their performances are immaterial to the film, which tries to make a supposed war between cats and dogs seem interesting. Ironically, the puppets and computer-generated moving mouths make the movie seem more fake and less interesting. Most of the time, the evil cat leader, Mr. Tinkles (voice by Sean Hayes), looks like something that would scare the Huggies off of little children at Disneyland and send them careening into a lifetime of expensive therapy. I doubt we will be seeing "Mr. Tinkles: The Ride" anytime soon. It actually would have been better just to dub the lines, like in "Look Who's Talking." Unfortunately, special effects people appear hell-bent on ruling the film industry, and directors will stop at nothing to let them.

Ultimately, the issue here is that films like this one have lost all sense of subtlety. Those of us with a desire to be intellectually challenged are constantly pissed on because genetics has cursed a huge majority of the population with brains barely capable of doing anything other than ingesting crap and birthing more stupid people (who in turn ingest more crap). We're a physically fat and lazy society full of intellectually fat and lazy people. George W. Bush is our leader. Though "Cats and Dogs" is the aesthetic equivalent of sniffing a dog's ass, get a good whiff, America -- it's the smell of the future.