The Garfield Movie opens in theaters May 24.
After nearly half a century in the funny pages, Garfield remains mostly as Jim Davis first drew him: a lazy tabby with a taste for lasagna, a distaste for Mondays, and a droll ambivalence towards his owner, Jon Arbuckle. But if the cat hasn’t changed, everything around him sure has, and you can see evidence of that all over The Garfield Movie, which begins with the world’s most famous kitty ordering his preferred Italian comfort food via a Grubhub-like smartphone app. Everybody in this caffeinated all-ages cartoon is addicted to their little screens. The forever lovelorn Jon (Nicholas Hoult) considers getting on Bumble. A key plot point revolves around an app that can translate meows into human speech. And even the villain – a persian feline fatale voiced by Hannah Waddingham – records and then immediately plays back her jump-scare entrance on a mobile device. Is this the only way to make Garfield relatable to modern kids and their dutifully accompanying parents: by turning him into a phone junkie?
In another respect, The Garfield Movie goes back to basics. After all, it marks a return to full animation after a pair of dire 2000s comedies that inserted an unsightly CGI cat (voiced by Bill Murray with an amusingly transparent indifference) into live-action surroundings. Garfield looks more like Garfield in this version, thanks to computer animation that better mimics the big-eyed, basic-stroke art work of the comic strip. He’s now voiced by Chris Pratt, who adds another animated avatar of intellectual property to his resume after trips to the Mushroom Kingdom and Bricksburg. There’s a certain upside to this casting: Pratt’s delivery is so generic and indistinct that fans can simply project however they think Garfield should sound over his delivery.
The simplicity of Davis’ writing isn’t as easily translated into feature form. On newsprint, Garfield is a repetitive, quotidian gag machine – a daily comedy built around the cat’s basically static deadpan. The Garfield Movie covers that ground in about five minutes, with a greatest-hits montage of naps, binge eating, and playful rapport with Jon’s speechless beagle Odie (whose barks and whimpers are apparently provided by Harvey Guillén, not that you can ever tell). The meat of the movie is a noisier, busier caper, in which Garfield gets roped into a heist with his estranged father, Vic (fellow Marvel paycheck-casher Samuel L. Jackson), who we first see via an opening flashback almost certainly designed to drum up demand for a saucer-eyed, kitten-Garfield plush toy. It’s a strangely sentimental development: At last, we get to see Garfield the cat overcome his abandonment issues!
Much of the action unfolds at the dairy farm the reunited pair are coerced into robbing by Waddingham’s vengeful, formerly impounded Jinx – a location that millennial Garfieldians might recognize as a nod to the barnyard “and friends” half of his late ’80s/early ’90s Saturday morning sitcom. Here, we’re introduced to a stoic bull (Ving Rhames), depressed after a lifetime of playing corporate mascot. Is this a stealth reference to Garfield’s own decades as a cash cow? It wouldn’t be the only joke aimed at the chaperones in the audience; when Rhames’ bovine character is at last reunited with his cow sweetheart, Marvin Gaye kicks in on the soundtrack while the two get freaky off screen.
Animation veteran Mark Dindal orchestrates the hijinks, and there are a few moments that tease a more unleashed slapstick family film in the vein of his delightfully madcap The Emperor’s New Groove. There’s some fun to be had with the bad guys, including a classic Tex Avery big-and-little duo of henchdogs (one of them voiced by Waddingham’s Ted Lasso costar Brett Goldstein) and a Cecily Strong-voiced security officer plainly, strangely modeled on the “Minnesota nice” of Fargo’s Marge Gunderson. Meanwhile, a sequence in the plant involving cheese-related death traps – including a conveyor built that slowly grates away the platform Garfield is standing on – recalls Star Wars: Episode II–Attack of the Clones, of all movies. And Dindal cuts away for a couple of inspired, traditionally animated detours; if you’ve ever wondered what Garfield would look like in the style of Rocky and Bullwinkle, this movie obliges.
Mostly, however, the director seems neutered by the demands of a studio animation project eager to pander to kids and adults alike. The Garfield Movie gets downright Shrekian in its flurry of pop-culture references – another break from the cultural-vacuum quality Davis adopted as a way to make sure his comic strip crossed borders with ease. Was anyone dying to hear Garfield call himself “G-money” or crack jokes about Shark Tank? And what’s with all the Tom Cruise winking, from a direct namedrop to the lazy airing of both the Mission: Impossible and Top Gun scores? Speaking of dopey music cues, The Garfield Movie leans heavily on a single, unremarkable tie-in single by Jon Batiste that it rolls no fewer than three times over a hectic 90 minutes.
None of this should offend Davis. He’s always been candid, after all, about the cynical motivations behind Garfield, a character he designed to be as marketable and accessible as possible, down to making his most prominent traits – gluttony and laziness – a reflection of universal human needs. The play for lowest-common denominator paid off: His strip is the most widely syndicated in history, and a total merchandise gold mine. In The Garfield Movie, the final stretch slumps shamelessly into a montage of product placement disguised as gags. It’s only then, when singing the praises of Walmart, FedEx, and Olive Garden, that the film taps into the true spirit of its daily source material: a piggy bank in the shape of a grinning house pet.
