THE GARFIELD MOVIE - Mark Reviews Movies

The Garfield Movie, Sony Pictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 23, 2024

If the Garfield from the long-running comic strip were to watch The Garfield Movie, the cat would probably pass out from the exhaustion of just thinking about exerting a quarter of the energy shown by his movie version. Simply by way of cultural osmosis, there are three things everybody knows about Jim Davis' comic creation, whether or not that person has looked at a single panel from the comics: The orange tabby cat hates Mondays, loves lasagna, and, above all else, is lazy to core of his very being. Whoever the character in this movie may be, this feline definitely isn't Garfield.

That's not inherently a problem with this computer-animated movie about the eponymous cat. After all, part of the reason people know about Garfield, regardless of their interest in the comics, is because he's such a simple, easily defined character. It would be difficult to make a feature-length movie about the cat with just those characteristics to guide a story, so a little expansion and some alterations are to be expected.

The screenplay here (written by Paul A. Kaplan, Mark Torgove, and David Reynolds) gives Garfield a sentimental back story, a surprising proficiency with technology, and a much softer attitude about his helpless owner, the dog that lives with him, and life in general. They've made him friendlier, more accessible to kids, and, like the movie in which he finds himself, completely generic.

It doesn't matter that they've changed Garfield's personality, but it does matter considerably that the filmmakers have made him personality-free. Say what you will about the two live-action versions a couple decades ago (There's not much to say, really), but that computer-generated variation, thanks mostly to Bill Murray's vocal performance, didn't come up as short in that department.

As voiced by Chris Pratt, this iteration of Garfield comes across as pretty bland, sounding more as if he vaguely dislikes the inconveniences to his sleepy existence, until the adventures start, and is happy to crack safe jokes instead of indulging in sarcasm. That cynicism is another thing everyone knows about the comic-strip cat, and the quality is pretty much absent here. One gets the feeling the movie desperately wants everybody to like Garfield, and in trying to please everyone, the material loses whatever spark it might have had.

Instead, we learn how Garfield was seemingly abandoned by his father as a kitten and found the lonely Jon Arbuckle (voice of Nicholas Hoult) while his future owner was having dinner alone at an Italian restaurant. There's at least some familiar humor to the early sections of seeing a kitten Garfield basically teleporting from dish to dish in order to get his fill and of watching the 5-year-old cat go about his daily routine. Then, Garfield and Odie (with barks and other canine sounds provided by Harvey Guillén) are abducted by a pair of tough dogs, and the rest of the movie's plot and comedy retreat to the stuff of pure formula.

That plot has Garfield and his father Vic (voice of Samuel L. Jackson) being reunited, just before Jinx (voice of Hannah Waddingham), a former member of Vic's street cat gang, coerces the three to steal more than a thousand quarts of milk from a heavily guarded farm. Garfield, Vic, and Odie have to hop on a moving train (Our protagonist ends up bouncing back and forth between everything but the train), devise a plan to infiltrate the farm with the help of wronged bull mascot Otto (voice of Ving Rhames), and, finally, navigate an elaborate assembly line of various dairy products.

Actually, there's even more, including a rescue mission on a speeding train and the resolution of that father-son conflict. The movie is tiresome—and tiring, really—with its many, many distractions before the story comes close to that, though, so the final stretch of this material is really quite the, well, stretch.

It all does feel like a distraction, too—not only in terms of the busy visuals (which do at least appropriately translate Davis' comics into three dimensions, for whatever that's worth), but also from broad the humor is (lots of slapstick, pop-culture references, and stating what's happening as if that's a joke) and how little the movie seems to care about making these characters unique in any way. The one exception, oddly, is Odie, who doesn't say a word but physically, subtly communicates how increasingly irritated he is with essentially being a servant to an egotistical, pampered cat.

It's not as if the comic strip sets a high bar for characters or comedy. Even so, The Garfield Movie falls below that mark.

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