Jonah Naplan   May 25, 2024

Jim Davis’ Garfield was one of the key literary figures of my youth. Reading his comic strip compilations as a young boy filled my afternoons with hours of laughs and excitement. To say that “The Garfield Movie” falls short of fulfilling almost everything that makes the character so special would be an understatement, especially to someone who grew up loving its dark humor and sarcastic commentary. Directed by Mark Dindal (“The Emperor’s New Groove,” “Chicken Little”) and written by David Reynolds, Mark Torgove, and Paul A. Kaplan, this is a movie that fundamentally misunderstands who its protagonist actually is, stripping him and other lovable characters of what made them so funny. The result is a bare bones children’s film that feels so distant from its source material that it could likely swap out Garfield for some other cartoon main character, and the plot would be unaffected. That’s the level of soullessness we’re dealing with here.

Who doesn’t love Garfield? He’s fat, he’s lazy, he loves food, he hates Mondays. I believe we’d all secretly like to have his life, lounging around listlessly while barking orders to an obedient servant. He’s always had a charming mean streak, a key character trait that seems to have been lost among the contractual foray of his latest outing. This time, he’s voiced by Chris Pratt (seemingly Hollywood’s go-to voice actor of the last few years), a performer whose usual, bouncy schtick does not match the smug, rigid attitude of Garfield, which immediately renders this movie unreliable. The filmmakers seem to think that lowering the feline’s crass mindset will make him more likable. The result, however, has the opposite effect. This Garfield is dumbed-down, less selfish, kinder, and boring. He might be the new Garfield but he’s not our Garfield. Though it’s certainly a challenge to translate a series of three-panel comic strips into a big screen adaptation, the plot that surrounds him, too, is devoid of any Garfield spirit whatsoever, streamlining all the animated movie clichés you can possibly think of into one half-baked narrative.

The film opens with the fat cat’s “origin story,” as it was. Garfield’s father Vic (voice of Samuel L. Jackson), appeared to have abandoned the young feline in an alleyway on a dark and stormy night, leading the kitten to spot Jon Arbuckle (voice of Nicholas Hoult) through the window of an Italian joint across the street. After hungrily devouring all of Jon’s food and that of the other customers, too, the two lost souls bonded in a quiet moment before Jon decided to take Garfield home with him. The montage that follows is the best chunk of the entire movie because it’s the most true to form of what Garfield should be; the cat soon becomes the real owner of the household, “allowing” Jon to adopt Odie (Harvey Guillén), ordering food via drone delivery service, and scrolling through a streaming service called Catflix. Everything is in its right place until Vic re-enters the picture carrying baggage. He’s gotten himself caught up with some of the wrong people, namely Jinx (Hannah Waddingham), a former fashionista-turned-con-cat who was sent to the pound after Vic left her behind during a perilous heist at an esteemed milk farm.

The only way to repay her is for Garfield, Odie and Vic to set aside their differences and team up to return to the same farm and steal one quart of milk for every day Jinx was imprisoned. Their travels lead them to a sad bull named Otto (Ving Rhames), who might be able to help them get inside, so long as they help him reunite with his beloved mate Ethel, a cow from whom he was separated after their farm changed hands with a different corporation. The whole mid-section of “The Garfield Movie” is a heist picture, an idea that might have worked better if it didn’t star Garfield, a character who we know would never agree to such physical activities. Eventually, everyone ends up on a speeding train over sharp rocks with lots of running and pushing and defying gravity, a finale that lacks all the emotional and thematic bravado that it seemed to set itself up for.

I’m really not sure who the target audience of “The Garfield Movie” is. The film is stuffed with bizarre jokes and references to things that kids won’t understand and adults won’t notice either because they’ve already checked out. It needle-drops the “Mission: Impossible” and “Top Gun” themes, mentions Tom Cruise and Daniel Day-Lewis, and explicitly references Joel and Ethan Coen’s “Fargo” via a security guard named Marge who speaks in a North Dakota accent. On the other end of the stick, the humor actually directed towards kids is just cheap slapstick that panders to their intelligence. The wit is all gone. The snarkiness has vanished. Garfield’s very soul cannot be found.

It’s frustrating enough that this movie completely disregards what made the signature comic strip so funny, but it’s worse that it also vastly misinterprets the value of the Garfield character by tossing him into an adventure that doesn’t highlight any of his strengths or trademark idiosyncrasies. It’s even unfair to call this a “Garfield” movie at all because its protagonist can’t be called Garfield. Even Bill Murray’s two “Garfield” outings from the early 2000s did a better job than this movie does of defining how this character would actually act in certain scenarios. There’s no “flexible” version of Garfield, no “open to adventure” version of Garfield. The whole point of the character is that he doesn’t want to do anything of effort. The filmmakers clearly don’t trust that fans would show up to a movie about Garfield just being Garfield. The end product is a soulless cash grab of little substance other than endless opportunities for merchandising. The movie may have his namesake, but Garfield leaves not a trace.

Now playing in theaters.