The Garfield Movie (2024)

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Jim Davis’ Garfield was once a very funny gag comic strip. It would go on to spawn a great Saturday morning cartoon series, and was an omnipresent marketing machine second only to Charles Schulz’s Peanuts at the height of its popularity. 20 years ago saw the first of two “live-action” movies starring Bill Murray as the titular tabby hit theaters, and while profitable, only serve as a setup to Murray’s iconic disparagement of them in Zombieland.

But success took its toll; at some point Jim Davis largely abandoned the work of creating new comic strips to staff, and the character has become more popular as a meme than a relevant laugh generator. One suspects the dilution of Garfield’s relevance as a comic strip was a primary factor in Bill Watterson’s refusal to license his Calvin and Hobbes characters for anything outside of the printed page.

But at this point Garfield (TM) is less a creative endeavor and more a lazy branding effort. If the 2015 Peanuts movie was a loving homage to its source material, The Garfield Movie shows there’s a little more scraping at the bottom of the Garfield barrel left.

via YouTube

Rather than focus on the daily household foibles and tribulations between the cast, The Garfield Movie reboots the character’s mythos, abandoning the reliable gag structure that generated millions of books, calendars, and office posters. Instead, this new version serves an origins story about how Garfield (Chris Pratt) came to live with Jon Arbuckle (Nicholas Hoult), the genesis of his love for Italian food, and how the two – along with lovable pooch Odie (Harvey Guillén) would form a modern family unit.

But then it inexplicably becomes an action-oriented heist flick, which is probably the last thing you think of when you think of Garfield. While trying to enjoy a midnight snack Garfield and Odie are kidnapped and whisked away to an abandoned mall, their fate uncertain until a mysterious stranger attempts to rescue them – and fails.

Their would-be rescuer reveals himself as Vic (Samuel L. Jackson), Garfield’s long-lost father who abandoned him years ago. It’s then furthered revealed their kidnapping was ordered by Jinx (Hannah Waddingham), a Persian cat from England harboring her own personal grudge with Vic. Years earlier, a botched milk heist at Lactose Farms left Jinx doing time at the pound, and she blames Vic for abandoning her. However, she’s willing to strike a deal: if Vic can pay back the quart of milk she lost during the failed heist she’d be willing to let bygones be bygones.

But Jinx also wants interest for every day she spent locked up, a considerable milk tally that won’t be easy to get. Worse, she insists the feuding father and son handle business together…or else.

There was plenty of online scuttlebutt about Chris Pratt assuming Nintendo’s mustachioed mascot in last year’s The Super Mario Bros. Movie, replacing longtime gaming voice actor Charles Martinet. The film proved he was fine in the role. Here, that fear was warranted as Pratt is totally and completely miscast as the orange feline, his vocal performance lacking any of the dry sarcasm and wit that both Lorenzo Music and Bill Murray brought to the character. It’s disturbing how uninterested he sounds.

The rest of the cast does their job, meaning they speak lines given to them. Samuel L. Jackson brings nothing to the role of Garfield’s dad, proving once again that he’ll star in anything for a paycheck. There are a few bright spots, however. Ving Rhames is fun as Ox, a lovelorn bull who’ll stop at nothing to save his lady love, and Nicholas Hoult’s Jon Arbuckle sounds so much like Micheal Cera I actually thought it was Micheal Cera, which might have been perfect casting for the character. Harvey Guillén’s Odie is the actor’s second gig as a diminutive little dog in an animated movie in a row after Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, though here he just provides dog sounds.

Director Mark Dindal is a legendary Disney animator, but his solo directorial efforts (Cat’s Don’t Dance, Chicken Little) have been subpar at best, but Garfield is the worst of them all. This film is uninspired, utilizing little to none of the (I can’t believe I’m saying this) Garfield mythos that would have resulted in a slower paced but funnier use of the IP. The animation does little to mimic Jim Davis’ familiar style, apart from characters’ egg-shaped eyes, with barren backdrops and largely static cameras giving everything a low-rent look and feel.

Worse is the story, which should have been an introduction (or reintroduction) to these characters, but gets bogged down in secondary caper nonsense. The movie also tries that lazy sentimentality gimmick where on-the-nose piano cues signal between slapstick and sensitive bits, cheaply trying to manipulate the audience into thinking this story has more gravitas than it does. Spoiler: it doesn’t.

Like so many recent animated features that rely more on recognizable IP than artistry (think Illumination’s Grinch or 2021’s Tom & Jerry) The Garfield Movie doesn’t seem to mind that it’s little more than a digital babysitter, something colorfully inoffensive enough to distract the kids for a few hours. In a world where quality stuff like Puss in Boots: The Last Wish and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem exist kids deserve better than second-hand kitty litter.

The Garfield Movie is terrible, both as a representation of the Garfield Brand and as an animated movie, and I’m at a loss to guess who its audience might be. It’s not silly enough for kids, not clever enough for their parents, or interesting enough for hardcore comic strip fans to give a hoot about. The voice actors are totally checked out, the animation looks cheap, and this story and its characters bear little resemblance to any version of Garfield and friends we’ve seen before. It’s wild to think that any movie could make you long for the crappy Bill Murray versions, but here we are.