'The Garfield Movie' review: A heist flick with daddy issues
The orange cat at the center of CG-animated The Garfield Movie (not to be confused with 2004’s Garfield: The Movie) certainly looks like the Garfield we know and love. Sure, he adores lasagna (of course) and hates Mondays (of course), but that’s where the similarities with the classic Jim Davis creation end.
Voiced by Chris Pratt, this Garfield is engineered to be blandly appealing. All the characteristics that made him interesting, like his reliable grumpiness and trademark snark, are gone, with his personality now comprised primarily of his insatiable hunger for Italian food in lieu of anything else. This Garfield would never kick Odie (What We Do In The Shadows' Harvey Guillén) off a table, and he mostly just purrs adoringly at Jon (Nicholas Hoult). Scenes of the traditionally cantankerous cat as an adorable kitten are also included, which seems a blatant inclusion for fluffy merch you can buy at Walmart.
This deviation to create an inoffensive, more palatable lead character could be forgiven if The Garfield Movie were actually any good, but it strains to achieve its 101-minute runtime and is only fitfully amusing — no matter how preposterous its plot.
What is The Garfield Movie about?
Other than Mondays, the only true object of Garfield's ire is his deadbeat dad, Vic, who abandoned Garfield as a kitten. (Men will subject us to an entire movie about a cat and his feline father rather than go to therapy and talk about their relationships with their human dads.)
Vic (voiced by Samuel L. Jackson) reappears in his life and swiftly draws Garfield and Odie into his criminal world. (This Garfield is a little lazy, but not so much that he puts up a fight when he is inexplicably drawn into a dangerous heist.) The trio is forced by the devious cat Jinx (The Fall Guy's Hannah Waddingham) to steal a milk truck from the local dairy, Lactose Farms. There, they meet Otto (Ving Rhames), a lonely bull who has been separated from the bovine love of his life, Ethel (Alicia Grace Turrell). If Otto helps them steal the milk, they promise to reunite him with Ethel.
The Garfield Movie doesn’t feel like a Garfield movie.
If you think this plot seems a little convoluted and distinctly un-Garfield-like, you’re not wrong. The screenplay written by Paul A. Kaplan, Mark Torgove, and David Reynolds feels like it wasn’t even a Garfield movie to begin with, just a standard family-friendly adventure that could make more money if it had a familiar character attached to it. The Garfield Movie seems like they took a story and simply added the requisite number of lasagna mentions and called it a day.
There are a few references that will please fans: a couple of hat tips to creator Jim Davis, the appearance of Garfield’s beloved Pookie, and a nod to celebrated actor Lorenzo Music, who voiced Garfield on the small screen. But anyone who cared about earlier iterations of the character will be as grumpy as Garfield on a Monday in the face of the movie's larger affronts.
If the mere presence of a cat resembling Garfield isn’t enough to make the movie profitable, they’ve also inserted pretty egregious product placement throughout the movie, just in case. Oddly prominent bags of Popchips just keep showing up on screen. Garfield places an order from the Walmart app, which arrives via FedEx. But worst of all, we see branded bags of leftovers from Olive Garden in Jon’s fridge — and we know there wouldn’t even be leftovers if Garfield were at the table.
Now, I don’t see Garfield IP as a pinnacle of artistic integrity, free from the influence of capitalism. Merch and tie-ins have been a mainstay for the comic strip character for decades, and it’s difficult to imagine a product that hasn't had the orange cat's face slapped on it. Yet there's something especially gross about the bald-faced opportunism of such blatant product placement in a film ostensibly meant for kids.
However, even the stuff in the movie intended for younger viewers doesn't really work. Gags seem inserted to pad the running time, rather than to entertain. In an overlong sequence where he's trying to get on a moving train, Garfield bounces back and forth, over and through the cars. If executed well, it could have been a delight and a showcase for the animation, but it just lands flat. I have a notoriously easy laugh, but even I only giggled at a handful of jokes — and it was less frequent than the times I checked my watch.
Chris Pratt is wrong for Garfield.
Though he'd be miscast to voice a previous incarnation of Garfield, whose gruff, grumbly mien would've been better voiced by someone like Nick Offerman, Pratt is fine as this goofy, good-natured version. His performance works well enough with how the character is written here, but there's nothing remarkable about the performance.
Pratt didn't really impress as Mario in The Super Mario Bros. Movie, and The LEGO Movie doesn't owe its success to Pratt's funny enough, if standard, voice for Emmet. However, here he's bringing Golden Retriever energy to the world's most famously grumpy cat. This feels like another sign The Garfield Movie was reverse-engineered around Garfield rather than made for him.
For her part, Hannah Waddingham relishes the role of the feline villain Jinx, playing up every sinister line. Meanwhile, her Ted Lasso co-star Brett Goldstein and Saturday Night Live's Bowen Yang add a bit of humor as her canine companions, Roland and Nolan, respectively. Poorly utilized, however, is Hoult. His performances are usually a highlight in whatever he appears in, from his insane drive as Nux in Mad Max: Fury Road to his delightfully prissy brattiness as Peter in The Great. However, Hoult isn't given much to do here, other than provide a believably American accent. Jon is barely present and could've been voiced by anyone. Meanwhile, Samuel L. Jackson sounds like... Samuel L. Jackson.
As for the CG animation — which seems to be a requisite for theatrical releases aimed at kids — the best that can be said is is that it's serviceable. The various creatures' fur has distinctive textures, which fits with animation trends in this medium and this age. However, it's an intentional departure from Davis' strips, which were comprised of simple lines and color but captured movement and emotion well
When you strip intellectual property of anything identifiable (other than a love of lasagna), what is even the point of using it in the first place, other than to make more money? This makes The Garfield Movie cynical in a way that the original, more selfish version of Garfield might appreciate. It's hard to see this film serving as anything more than a momentary diversion for kids, who don’t even know what a newspaper is, while their parents grumble in the seats next to them, robbed of any chance of nostalgia.