101 min | PG | May 24, 2024 | Sony Pictures
Chris Pratt voices Garfield in a heist movie about a cat reuniting with his deadbeat dad. The lasagna-loving indoor cat deserves better. So does the audience.
Garfield is an indoor cat who loves lasagna and hates Mondays. His long-lost father Vic shows up after years of absence. Then a criminal cat named Jinx forces Garfield, Odie, and Vic into pulling a heist to steal milk from a dairy farm. That is the movie. The world’s most famous lazy cat is now in an action-heist film with daddy issues. The Jim Davis comic strip was about a cat being sarcastic on a Monday. This film turns that into a franchise vehicle with a father-son redemption arc that nobody wanted.
Chris Pratt voices Garfield and the casting is wrong from the first line. Garfield’s voice should be dry, sardonic, and exhausted. Pratt delivers energetic, friendly, and busy. It is the voice of a man collecting a paycheck, not inhabiting a character. Samuel L. Jackson voices Vic with gruff charm that works better than it should. Hannah Waddingham voices Jinx with theatrical villainy. Ving Rhames voices a bull named Otto. The voice cast is talented. The material is not.
Mark Dindal directed The Emperor’s New Groove, which was funny and strange and inventive. This film is none of those things. The animation is competent and generic. The character designs strip Garfield of his chunky, expressive comic-strip look in favor of smooth, marketable CG. The heist sequences are staged without tension or wit. The humor is broad and lands rarely. The emotional beats about absent fathers are manufactured.
Garfield has been a merchandising empire for decades. The character exists on t-shirts and coffee mugs and car window stickers. This film treats him the same way. He is not a character. He is a product being repackaged for a new generation. The product is shiny and empty. The original comic strip had a deadpan cruelty to it that made Garfield specific. This film makes him generic. That is the worst thing you can do to a character whose entire identity was attitude.