101 min | PG | February 26, 2021 | Warner Bros. Pictures
A cat and a mouse take their feud to a fancy Manhattan hotel during a celebrity wedding. The animation is hand-drawn over live action, which is the one bold idea here. Then the movie hands the spotlight to the people.
A cat chases a mouse through a luxury Manhattan hotel. That is the whole movie, dressed up in live action and a wedding subplot. Tom the cat and Jerry the mouse arrive in the city and end up at the Royal Gate Hotel, where a high-profile celebrity wedding is about to happen. Kayla, a young woman who lied her way into a temp job at the hotel, has to evict Jerry before the event. The film spends most of its energy on the humans and treats the cartoon animals as a problem to be managed rather than the reason anyone showed up.
Chloë Grace Moretz plays Kayla as a striver faking competence, and she commits to the panic of someone in over her head. The script gives her almost nothing to push against. Michael Peña plays Terence Mendoza, the event manager whose career rides on the wedding, and his slow-burn breakdown is the only human performance with a clear arc. Colin Jost and Pallavi Sharda play Ben and Preeta, the engaged couple, with the flat pleasantness of characters who exist to be inconvenienced. Ken Jeong plays Chef Jackie loud and Rob Delaney plays the hotel manager Henry Dubros nervous, and both are stranded in scenes that do not need them.
Tim Story directs from a script by Kevin Costello, and the central choice defines the film. The animals are hand-drawn cartoons composited into live-action sets. The technique is the most interesting thing on screen and the most undermined. Tom and Jerry exist in a world with weight and lighting and human reactions, but their slapstick obeys cartoon physics that the live-action staging cannot sell. The seams show in every chase, and the editing cuts away from the animal gags to the human plot exactly when the gags start to build momentum.
The classic shorts work because nothing interrupts the violence between the cat and the mouse. This film interrupts it constantly. Tom and Jerry become supporting players in a story about a wedding and a temp job, and neither thread earns the attention it steals. The animation craft deserved a better container. What surrounds it is a hotel comedy that forgot to be a Tom and Jerry cartoon.