The Garfield Movie Sucks in a Dramatically Different Fashion Than the Terrible Comic Strip That Ostensibly Inspired It

I never thought I would write these words, but Garfield failed to make me laugh.

If I were Jim Davis and I had just been shown The Garfield Movie for the first time, I would send the producers just one brief note: “What the hell does any of this shit have to do with Garfield?” 

The remarkable thing about The Garfield Movie is that it has not just one tone that seems screamingly wrong for a Garfield project but three or four. 

I was amazed at how brazenly, boldly, and nonsensically off-brand The Garfield Movie is. An Itchy & Scratchy film adaptation where they no longer fight but instead have brunch and go antiquing would be only slightly less faithful to its source material than this head-scratcher. 

First, The Garfield Movie is cloyingly cute and sugary. When first introduced, Garfield was a beady-eyed lump, but he got cuter and rounder as the strip became more popular and Jim Davis’s multi-media/merchandising empire grew. 

When Garfield starred in his 1980s cartoon from the old pros at Film Roman, he was cute, round, and anthropomorphic, but that’s not enough for these monsters. They’re not going for cute; they’re going for adorable. Not just adorable: too adorable. They’re going for far, far too adorable. They want Baby Garfield to be so adorable that he makes audiences puke rainbows, sunshine, and lollipops. The Garfield Movie’s kitten Garfield is supposed to be so disgustingly, over-the-top, and manipulatively cute that he makes Hello Kitty look like Bill the Cat by comparison. 

The Garfield Movie shaves away its protagonist’s rough edges so that he’s bland enough to be voiced by Christopher Pratt. Like everyone, I was once charmed by Christopher Pratt. He was so appealing and puppy dog-like on Parks & Recreation! He and Anna Faris seemed like such a cute couple! He was such a winning and unexpected superhero in Guardians of the Galaxy! 

How great was that, incidentally? It genuinely changed the course of superhero cinema, but not necessarily for the better. 

It’s been all downhill from there, however. Now when I see that Pratt is voicing Mario or Garfield, I think, “That fucking guy? Why didn’t they go with someone with a personality?” 

Christopher Pratt is not Garfield. At no point in The Garfield Movie did I ever accept Pratt as Garfield. He’s a boring ass white dude devoid of attitude and catitude. Lorenzo Music, he is not. He won’t even make anyone forget Bill Murray.

Pratt’s Whitebread, Yankee Candle, Vanilla tribute to blandness and mediocrity embodies the bizarrely off nature of this confused endeavor. 

Jon is Garfield’s oblivious punching bag in every other iteration, the doofus target of his constant insults. In The Garfield Movie, however, Jon is an earth angel whose relationship with Garfield is defined by unconditional adoration on both sides. 

The Garfield Movie would never be cruel enough to depict Jon, now a God among men and the very image of Christ-like kindness and compassion, in a less-than-flattering fashion. 

Jon takes pity on an adorable widow kitty cat he spies gazing up at him with impossibly big eyes as he eats at an Italian restaurant. The exemplar of human decency takes him home and devotes his life to making this orphan kitten happy. 

They have an idyllic relationship, and Garfield leads a blessed existence until his father, Vic (Samuel L. Jackson), unexpectedly pops back into his life.

Through Vic, Garfield gets involved in an elaborate heist to steal a large quantity of milk from a milk processing plant for Jinx, a Persian cat with a long, unfortunate history with Vic. 

I cannot for the life of me understand why anyone thought that a sedentary feline whose hobbies include eating, sleeping, and being an asshole should be re-imagined as an action hero in a heist movie that’s way too cute and way too depressing. 

This leads to an even more out-of-place subplot involving the star-crossed love between Otto, a former dairy mascot voiced by a solemn Ving Rhames, and his soulmate Ethel. Earnest romance also does not belong in Garfield’s world, yet it’s at the center of the misleadingly titled The Garfield Movie. 

It should have been called Movie Involving a Cat Named Garfield That Likes To Eat, But That’s Pretty Much the Only Thing in Common With the Comic Strip Version of Garfield. That would have been more accurate if more unwieldy. Also, I’m not sure that would fit on a movie marquee. 

Garfield’s incandescent rage towards the father who abandoned him is the fuel that drives the film. That should not be true of a movie about Garfield. 

I know what you’re probably saying right now. You think that all this sounds incredibly powerful and that, if anything, Garfield works better as a heavy familial melodrama of abandonment, drama, and reconciliation than it does as a lazy, one-note comic strip about an asshole cat who overeats. 

I wish that were true, reader. I wish that I could tell you that The Garfield Movie moved me in a deep and profound way, that I wept tears of sadness and tears of joy as I went on this emotional journey with Garfield, Odie, Jon, and Vic, who has already established himself as the Corey of Halloween Ends of this franchise. 

Like Corey, the most popular horror villain in film history, Vic is a rapturously received new character introduced a good forty-five years into a franchise’s existence who inexplicably takes center stage, winning all of our hearts in the process. 

I was so unengaged by The Garfield Movie that a massive plot thread involving the fat cat’s intense resentment and anger towards a father whose abandonment scarred him in ways he does not understand and will never get over made me think about my mother abandoning me as a baby. 

Instead of being wrapped up in the film’s unpalatable combination of competently executed action-adventure set piece and morose family melodrama, I thought about the hole my mother’s abandonment left in my heart and my psyche and how I’ll probably never really get over it, no matter how long I live. 

A dumb cartoon movie for children shouldn’t make you reflect on your formative trauma, but The Garfield Movie did. 

The Garfield Movie made me feel weirdly protective of a character I don’t like and think represents the triumph of bland mediocrity. If you make a movie about Garfield, make him the character everyone knows, loves, or reluctantly tolerates. Don’t plug Garfield into a generic funny talking animal action adventure and think audiences won’t notice or mind. 

It feels like they had an unimpressive spec script for a movie about an abandoned kitten who goes on an adventure with his long-lost dad and decided to make it commercially palatable by sticking Garfield in the lead role and throwing in occasional references to his lore. 

It shouldn’t feel like an easter egg when one of the best-known characters in pop culture behaves like they have always behaved. Yet when Garfield expresses a fondness for lasagna (specifically Olive Garden, who have heavy product placement throughout the film, and, not coincidentally, a tie-in with the movie at their restaurants), we’re reminded that Garfield’s love of Italian food is one of about three semi-jokes the comic strip has been recycling for nearly fifty years. 

I never thought I would write these words, but Garfield failed to make me laugh. 

One star out of Five 

Be a Jon Arbuckle-like exemplar of compassion and generosity by  contributing to the Gofundme to get me new, permanent teeth that work over at https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-nathans-journey-to-dental-implants