Like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Garfield keeps getting resurrected and rebooted. Does it matter how we found the last Garfield? No. Just like it doesn’t matter that the Mutant Ninja Turtles never found a permanent audience. That doesn’t matter because they have today’s audience. This is how not-so-timeless cartoons work, I guess.
Admittedly, I was excited to see (well, hear) Samuel L. Jackson as part of the cast. Oh, that would have been a glorious take on Garfield, huh? I don’t think I’d ever before imagined anyone say “mutherf***ing Odie” through bites of lasagna.
Oh, Jackson isn’t voicing Garfield. Awwwww.
Well, how about John? Or Odie? Wouldn’t Samuel L. Jackson make a great Odie?
No, huh?
Well, whom is Samuel L. Jackson voicing, then?
“Vic.”
Vic?
Vic.
Who the f*** is “Vic?”
Why, that’s Garfield’s estranged father, of course.
Of course.
And why is Garfield’s estranged father in this film?
Short answer: because Garfield is a pretty boring character, tbh. Sorry, but gluttony doesn’t play well … anywhere. It’s just not a sin that brings all the boys to the yard, y’know? And gluttony is Garfield’s shtick.
Oh well, I’ll move on. The Garfield Movie explores the origin of Garfield (voice of Chris Pratt, fresh off voicing Mario). We see pathetic kitten Garfield hidden beneath a cardboard box an alley in the rain greedily eying the Italian restaurant where John is alone with his shame. Approching John with exactly one intent, the big eyes thing works and Garfield immediately begins his unparalleled journey of gluttony. I’m not gonna shame John for being a sucker; good luck being an ogre to a kitten that makes big eyes and purrs in your lap.
And yet, it’s hard to see John as anything other than a sucker when Garfield abuses John’s credit card again and again and again.
I’m not sure how anything gets refrigerated when Garfield is around, but during a midnight raid, he and Odie (Nicholas Hoult) are abducted by Jinx (Hannah Waddingham), a feline fatale. Her plan is to coerce Vic out of hiding (check) and get him to do her bidding by holding his son
hostage (check). This amounts to stealing 1,675 quarts of milk from Lactose Farms.
It was somewhere in that next sequence of events that I first cared about anything I’d been watching. This is 40 minutes into the film and I had not yet cared about a single thing on screen. I will let the reader draw their own conclusion.
The thing I cared about was Otto, an aged bull forcibly removed from Lactose Farms and the heifer of his dreams. Awwwwww. Gotta say, now that I consider the plot of The Garfield Movie, I swear it was stolen from Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget.
I didn’t loathe The Garfield Movie, but I sure didn’t love it, either. Garfield represents one of my favorite animation styles, but other than a tongue-in-cheek Great Gatsby billboard, I don’t think the animation took enough advantage. I love the idea of Samuel L. Jackson voicing animated characters, yet nothing in this film will remind you of how and why you love Samuel L. Jackson … and selling his voice to a 6-year-old seems silly. There are some wonderful people in this film and live, bubbly animation, and yet there isn’t a single facet of the film that I care to recommend.
There once was a cat named Garfield
To gluttons he mostly appealed
Yet for lasagna’s sake
This plot was a half-bake
I had to wait until it congealed
Rated PG, 101 Minutes
Director: Mark Dindal
Writer: Paul A. Kaplan, Mark Torgove, David Reynolds
Genre: Pretending we care about him now
Type of being most likely to enjoy this film: The animators of this film, maybe?
Type of being least likely to enjoy this film: The tired masses
