After Garfield’s unexpected reunion with his long-lost father, ragged alley cat Vic, he and his canine friend Odie are forced from their perfectly pampered lives to join Vic on a risky heist.
Since the late 1970s, creator Jim Davis’s ‘Garfield’ comic strip has been a staple of the newspaper funnies section. From there, the characters went on to appear in a series of successful television specials before finding themselves in a popular Saturday morning show. In the 2000s, the property was featured in a couple of maligned live-action movies starring Bill Murray as the voice of the titular cat. Shortly thereafter, there was a new TV series and a few direct-to-disc films. Now, we’ve got “The Garfield Movie” coming to theaters.
Obviously, the Garfield IP continues to be very popular. So, how did we end up with this mess of a movie from director Mark Dindal? I can’t answer that question, but I can offer some thoughts and comments on this latest animated feature film.
Taking the three main characters from the comic strip – Garfield (Chris Pratt), Jon (Nicholas Hoult), and Odie (Harvey Guillén) – and placing them in a modernized setting, the movie begins with Garfield breaking the fourth wall to explain to the audience how he came to live with Jon. Abandoned in an alley on a stormy night by his father, Vic (Samuel L. Jackson), a young Garfield spots Jon eating alone in an Italian restaurant. Chaos with the ever-hungry cat ensues and results in Jon’s adoption of Garfield.
We then fast-forward to the present day, where Jon, Garfield, and Odie live happily together in their house in the suburbs – that is until Garfield and Odie are kidnapped. Enter villainess Jinx (Hannah Waddingham) and an unexplained reunion with Vic. The rest of the movie focuses on Vic, Garfield, and Odie attempting to steal milk to pay back Jinx for each day she was in the pound, the result of a prior milk heist led by Vic.
Dindal fills the movie with the usual cartoon hijinks and, to paraphrase another much-loved cartoon series, he might have gotten away with it too if it hadn’t been for Garfield. This movie has little to nothing to do with the Garfield property apart from sharing the main characters’ names and images. Dindal could have easily swapped out Garfield, Odie, and Jon with some other generic animated creations. While there’s a montage with many of Garfield’s famous characteristics, his mannerisms and behavior are not those of the cat most of us are familiar with.
“The Garfield Movie” is more about healing the broken relationship between father and son as they plan their heist. Again, this doesn’t sound like a plot line that aligns with the mood/themes of the source material. Isn’t Garfield supposed to be a lazy, wise guy? The writers (Paul A. Kaplan, Mark Torgove, and David Reynolds) throw in an assortment of oddball side characters to bulk up this adventure, resulting in a film that feels like another soulless CG animated feature.
After subjecting viewers to an onslaught of never-ending concluding scenes, a la Peter Jackson’s “The Return of the King,” “The Garfield Movie” ends exactly how you’d expect it to. This is a movie that offers nothing in the way of surprises. Young children and those unfamiliar with the characters might enjoy the movie (at least until that abysmal ending). Longtime fans will probably want to return to the original TV specials and animated series. Perhaps I’d have been more forgiving towards this movie if it hadn’t featured a beloved childhood character. As it stands, this is a movie I recommend avoiding.
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