Director: Mark Dindal
Cast: Chris Pratt, Samuel L. Jackson, Hannah Waddingham, Ving Rhames, Nicholas Hoult, Cecily Strong, Harvey Guillen, Brett Goldstein, Bowen Yang, Snoop Dogg
Screenplay: Paul A. Kaplan, Mark Torgove, David Reynolds
101 mins. Rated PG for action/peril and mild thematic elements.

It’s been 18 years since the Mondays-hating, lasagna-adoring Garfield graced our theater screens in the Tim Hill-directed Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties. Now taking a fully-animated form, The Garfield Movie has arrived, directed by Mark Dindal (The Emperor’s New Groove) with the lead character voiced by Chris Pratt (Avengers: Endgame). All these years later, I’ve been wondering if the character has any place in the popular culture canon. Having seen the new film, I believe there is a place for Garfield, just not in this iteration.

When Garfield has an unexpected encounter with his father Vic (Samuel L. Jackson, Pulp Fiction), who abandoned him as a kitten, Garfield and Odie (Harvey Guillen, Puss in Boots: The Last Wish) are thrust into an adventure in the wild, forced to join in a milk heist in order to earn their freedom from the vengeful yet fluffy villainous mastermind Jinx (Hannah Waddingham, The Fall Guy).

Did anything in that description sound like a Garfield movie to you? No, and I’ll tell you, this script feels like a generic heist movie made to play to children with the lead swapped out for an available IP to make that extra cash grab. The film opens with a number of Garfield-focused scenes displaying that hatred for Mondays and love for Italian cuisine, and the movie kind of works when we see Garfield for what made him special, including a few emotional beats that really worked for me. But there is never enough of that in the finished product as the movie meanders through a number of inconsequential sequences filled with unfunny attempts at humor.

Can we also use The Garfield Movie as Exhibit A in our argument to go back to having actual voice actors in animated works. That’s not to say that NAME actors can’t do it, but Chris Pratt is absolutely miscast, seemingly trying even less to craft a character than he did in last years The Super Mario Bros. Movie. There’s a reason he worked so well in The LEGO Movie is that he’s playing a generic LEGO figure who learns how important he is for just being him. That’s not Garfield, but he brings the same energy. I kept thinking how much better the film would’ve been with trained voice actors bringing these characters to life. It’s a different kind of performance with a different kind of training.

Outside of its confusing obsession with Tom Cruise movies, there’s little of note in The Garfield Movie. I wish the film had embraced its title character with more reverence, even focusing on the mundanity of cat life, but as soon as they can get out of the house, they do, leaving something that feels very little like a Garfield film. To be quite frank, I think I’d be more inclined to watch the 2004 film before seeing this one again.

2/5
-Kyle A. Goethe