‘The Cat in the Hat’ Review: Bill Hader Leads an Animated Dr. Seuss Comedy So Overstuffed It’s Like a Marvel Movie for Tots

The new "Cat in the Hat," it goes without saying at this point, makes no attempt to be a faithful adaptation of Dr. Seuss’s most fabled books. That would simply be too quaint for our buzzy, mercurial, attention-crashing, video-games-on-Ritalin era. Yet even as the movie departs a

The new "Cat in the Hat," it goes without saying at this point, makes no attempt to be a faithful adaptation of Dr. Seuss’s most fabled books. That would simply be too quaint for our buzzy, mercurial, attention-crashing, video-games-on-Ritalin era.

Yet even as the movie departs all too eagerly from the innocent wildness of the Seuss books, it devotes itself, with a corporate diligence that’s the opposite of free-spirited, to mimicking the scale and spirit and plot setups of too many familiar blockbusters. It’s a mish-mosh of pop recycling.