“The Garfield Movie” is about a fat orange cat who visually resembles the one in the comic strips printed in this newspaper. But it isn’t the same cat. The one in the animated film is an action hero. The one in the strip doesn’t like to move around much.
The strip is, maybe mostly these days, about the cat’s incompetent owner Jon. The human hardly figures in the movie. The cat in the strip is sarcastic. The one in the movie is actually sort of nice. And most significantly, the cat in the comic strip is funny. Not so in the movie.
The film feels like one of those corporate projects that buy their way to a certain amount of success. The folks who made the movie seem not to understand what it is newspaper readers like about the Garfield comic.
“But kids will like it,” you say. Probably so. After all, the cat in the movie is fat and mostly orange. Maybe that’s all kids need. But one wonders if kids are the audience for the newspaper strip. Certainly we wouldn’t figure that “The Garfield Movie” is going to be a long-time favorite film of anybody’s. But it will entertain young viewers for an hour and a half. Probably.
Besides not being funny, the film has a couple of obvious problems. One is that the voices used in it have been wiped clean of all personality. Does the voice of Chris Pratt, who speaks for Garfield, drip with cutting irony?
The filmmakers have paid for first-class acting talent here—Samuel L. Jackson, Jeff Foxworthy, Ving Rhames, Nicolas Hoult...Snoop Dogg for goodness sake. But the vocal performances could have been turned out by anyone who can read lines clearly. Only Hannah Waddingham, who speaks for the villain of the piece, manages to suggest any sense of fun.
The second major, major problem with the movie is that it frequently turns from its story to go maudlin in a Victorian sort of flashback about an orphan left in an alley. Cue the sad, sad music. And as the movie goes along, the frequency of tear-prompting instances increases. Late in the movie we can’t seem to go for two minutes without slipping back into Little Nell mode.
The film’s second story, about a bull and a cow, in love but kept apart by the cruel managers of a dairy-turned-theme-park, is a second opportunity for the sentimental violins. Do little kids prefer to be made sad as they are entertained? Certainly Hollywood thinks they do.
Super Garfield the action hero seems at one point to need the help of the bull. And late in the story we have to go back and solve the bovine problem before we can get to the emotion-laden climax of the movie’s hankie-wringing mode.
Actually we came to the theater to laugh at Garfield’s verbal shots at his romantically incompetent owner and their stupid canine roommate.
In the movie Odie isn’t the intellectual incompetent he is in the strip. Moviegoers aren’t allowed to chuckle along at dumb dog jokes.
But, then, what jokes are offered in exchange? Drone deliveries of Italian food. Doesn’t seem like a fair swap. No feline sarcasm. Instead we get acrobatics associated with boarding a moving train. This not only isn’t the same as the humor in the comic strip, it isn’t funny.
“It might have been” is not, after all, the saddest expression in the world of the cinema. The saddest Hollywood words are, “Maybe kids will like it.”
