Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore

This hyper kiddie flick has the best opening title sequence going right now: a terrific spoof of James Bond-style credit montages, with lots of feline silhouettes and iconic balls of yarn, etc. And there's a guilty-pleasure closing-credit crawl of YouTube lolcats and canine shenanigans. In between these two highlights, unfortunately, there's the rest of the movie. An attempt to build a franchise on 2001's semi-CGI Cats & Dogs, this sequel retains the basic idea that dogs are indeed Man’s Best Friend, maintaining an underground high-tech espionage op that mostly seeks to foil megalomaniacal cat super-villians. The main one here, Kitty Galore (voiced by Bette Midler), is a hairless feline determined to broadcast a high-frequency soundwave that will make dogs everywhere go crazy and fall into disfavor with their masters. An alliance of hound and cat agents (plus an annoying pigeon) seeks to foil Kitty Galore in an attention-deficit plot that has plenty of amusing moments but still suffers from a bad case of the friskies. We wish there was more vintage-'60s 007 satire here (Roger Moore lends his voice) to make the hyperkinetic comedy more in tune with the colorful Austin Powers series. As it is, the movie is OK family fun, but more shaky than stirring.