The Garfield Movie review – as messy as a child eat­ing spaghetti

Mark Dindal’s The Garfield Movie opens on some stealth adver­tis­ing for an invent­ed junk food deliv­ery ser­vice. Its dra­mat­ic cli­max includes a major call­back to said ser­vice, mak­ing a gag out of the fact that soon we’ll prob­a­bly have drones deliv­er­ing our greasy vit­tles. Hope­ful­ly young, eas­i­ly-influ­enced chil­dren and their more dis­cern­ing par­ents will be able to see through the film’s out-and-proud sales-ori­ent­ed super­text, but you’d be right to have gen­er­a­tional health con­cerns when wit­ness­ing a scene focused on cheese string art.

But maybe when we’re talk­ing about the famous­ly sloven­ly, snack-hap­py feline, Garfield, it should be a case enter­ing into the time hon­oured art-con­sumer pact with a sense of know­ing what you’ve paid for. Jim Davis’ once-wit­ty com­ic-strip cre­ation is no slouch when it comes to com­mer­cial tie-ins, but The Garfield Movie some­how marks some kind of obscene apoth­e­o­sis of this dark art.

Its strange­ly loose-leaf plot sends Garfield and his wide-eyed mutt chum Odie on a cross-coun­try crime spree which cul­mi­nates in them hav­ing to spring many gal­lons of milk from a com­mer­cial dairy at the behest of a schem­ing cat. A few snap­py one-lin­ers notwith­stand­ing, much of the film plays like incom­plete hold­ing mate­r­i­al, most promi­nent­ly a monot­o­nous mid-film train­ing mon­tage in which Garfield and his estranged father (voiced by Samuel L Jack­son who, for some rea­son, is try­ing not to sound like Samuel L Jack­son) are taught how to bond ahead of the big heist.

One aspect (of many) that ham­pers the film is what we call Chris Pratt voiceover fatigue syn­drome, or CPVFS, in which the sit­com scamp turned Mar­vel head boy rolls out all the same affect­ed­ly nervy moves he employed in the sim­i­lar­ly dire Super Mario Bros movie. It’s a tired and charm­less per­for­mance, like a boast­ful, out­spo­ken teenag­er who is des­per­ate to be found endear­ing. It’s alien­at­ing to the point where it’s hard to want the lit­tle scamp to suc­ceed in any­thing he does.

In terms of how this film looks, Din­dal and his team of ani­ma­tors do very lit­tle to push the boat out or expand the medi­um. This is cold­ly effi­cient dig­i­tal ani­ma­tion where func­tion trumps form at every avail­able oppor­tu­ni­ty. The edit­ing is so poor­ly timed, that even the big action set pieces con­tain lit­tle sus­pense. This is all in favour of sil­ly food gags and laboured slap­stick; thin ideas that are leaned on mul­ti­ple times. We know that it’s not tra­di­tion­al to take cats around the back of the barn and shoot them between the eyes, but this one…

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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