Vic (voiced by Samuel L. Jackson) and Garfield (voiced by Chris Pratt) in a scene from The Garfield Movie.DNEG Animation/Sony Pictures
The Garfield Movie
Directed by Mark Dindal
Written by Paul A. Kaplan, Mark Torgrove and David Reynolds, based on the comic strip by Jim Davis
Featuring the voices of Chris Pratt, Samuel L. Jackson and Ving Rhames
Classification G; 101 minutes
Opens in theatres May 24
A fistful of rotten lasagna that will make every day feel like Monday, The Garfield Movie arrives in theatres designed to test the limits of modern parenthood.
Listen, kids need weekend activities, and even though the weather is finally turning hospitable, sometimes the fun is going to involve heading to a dark room to stuff everyone’s faces full of synthetic butter. But between last week’s disastrously received imaginary-friend flick If from John Krasinski and this painfully laugh-free effort in fat-cat brand exploitation, Hollywood’s current idea of family-friendly entertainment seems to be sponsored by the folks at Durex.
Seemingly existing for no other reason than Sony Pictures having acquired the rights to Jim Davis’s blockbuster comic strip – but not the two live-action Bill Murray-voiced movies made two decades before – and needing something to fill the studio’s contractual obligations, this new Garfield outing is a true feat in shoulder-shrugging nothingness.
The story is laboriously dull, the animation is a hair above Cocomelon and the vocal performances feel so generic as to be the product of deep-fake artificial intelligence. My four-year-old son was pacified fine enough once I got a snack into him – even if he never delivered so much as a chuckle – but my two-and-a-half-year-old daughter wisely fled the scene early.
Vic, Garfield, Odie and Otto in a scene from The Garfield Movie.DNEG Animation/Sony Pictures
Critical obligation – if not parental responsibility – kept me in place for the full 101 minutes (!) that director Mark Dindal sadistically stretches out his tale, which is not only plodding but fundamentally misunderstands its title character.
A languorous smart-aleck whose appetite for sarcasm is only matched by his stomach for carbs, Garfield is meant to reflect our inner, cynical sloth. Kids and adults love him because we envy his lazy life of luxury, even if the little ones also get a rise when the slobbery Odie gets in his face. Everybody – including Davis, who has never been shy about his commercial intentions here – gets a droll chuckle, and life inside the Garfield household continues at its leisurely pace.
Yet for some reason, The Garfield Movie slips our hero into a heist movie, with the film’s trio of screenwriters (yes, it took three grown men, plus who knows how many other uncredited souls) convinced that what children really want is a decades-late riff on the oeuvre of Tom Cruise. Not just the star’s Mission: Impossible movies, which get multiple rib-injuring nods here (including the casting of Ving Rhames as the talking-bull version of his M:I character), but also an extended Top Gun reference that is as desperate as it sounds.
To that end, after a brief prologue detailing the story of how Garfield (Chris Pratt) ended up under the care of the eternally single cartoonist, Jon (Nicholas Hoult, doing what sounds an awful lot like an impression of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’s Charlie Day), the film shifts to full action-adventure mode. It turns out that Garfield’s long-lost father, Vic (voiced by an especially tired Samuel L. Jackson), needs his son’s help to settle an old debt he has with the villainous Persian cat, Jinx (Hannah Waddingham).
This involves staging a robbery that … actually, no, I’m not going to waste your or my time detailing the tediousness that follows. Just know that this film involves precious little Jon, an odious lack of Odie and enough crass corporate shilling (Walmart, Olive Garden, FedEx, Netflix) to make even the most YouTube-addicted child feel rather patronized.
Pratt – the new king of animated films, thanks to his sometimes inspired (The Lego Movie), sometimes merely inoffensive (The Super Mario Bros. Movie) work – at least got enough money to compel Bill Murray to re-examine his old contract. And let’s spare a thought for poor ol’ nearly forgotten Lorenzo Music, who voiced Garfield in the original animated series from the nineties, whose side characters are briefly referenced in this new film for the few dangerously obsessed Jim Davis acolytes.
But as my four-year-old said upon exiting the theatre, hey, the snacks were good.