Garfield: The Movie: Too Busy for this Lazy Cat

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MOVIE INFO:

Garfield (voiced by Chris Pratt), the world-famous, Monday-hating, lasagna-loving indoor cat, is about to have a wild outdoor adventure! After an unexpected reunion with his long-lost father — scruffy street cat Vic (voiced by Samuel L. Jackson) — Garfield and his canine friend Odie are forced from their perfectly pampered life into joining Vic in a hilarious, high-stakes heist.

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REVIEW:

I never really got use to Chris Pratt’s chipper rendition of Garfield in The Garfield Movie.  And there is not enough (Nicholas Hoult) Jon.  However, there is one perfect gleaming light in this pic of slight mis-fits, and it’s Odie, the beast that never speaks.  What he does is divine eloquence— a touch of Chaplin mime, the stride of Astaire. 

Odie brings art to a movie that felt the need to alter its comic reality.  You don’t saddle a lazy cat with an action plot involving a lost father’s return (even though Samuel L.  Jackson is perfectly fine), daddy issues, and a story that requires ginormous amounts of exercise and non-mental gymnastic.  The plot involves paying milk debts, derring do, reuniting a lonely purple bull with his white cow, and generally making father Tom, Jon, his disgruntled kitten and his little dog too, into one happy menagerie. 

Somewhere there is a great movie about laziness, hating Mondays , eating lasagna and just cat-flix and chillin. There’s close to sixty years of ideas in the strip.   Here being bold is to be old. Garfield needs to be just Garfield filling a lazy afternoon of Garfield mischief. 

Perhaps, the director Mark Dindal, thought that making an inert movie would honor Garfield’s essence?  Even better, making a lazy movie, that seems like its main character, at least in the way audience knows him, is not really there at all?  So Chris Pratt’s wrong voice in a slightly off creation is a meta invention? To the director’s and writer’s credit, Garfield does get a moving introduction of how he came to sit on the perfect couch in the Jon-verse, even if Odie is the only cool being there. Too bad, Bill Murray’s on set misbehaviors has him forever banned from inhabiting this universe.  He made that cat whine so fine.     

Just for the love of Odie, The Garfield Movie gets a B or a 3.0/5. 

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CREDITS:

Directed by

Mark Dindal

Screenplay by

• Paul A. Kaplan
• Mark Torgove
• David Reynolds

Based on

Garfield

by Jim Davis

Produced by

• John Cohen
• Broderick Johnson
• Andrew A. Kosove
• Steven P. Wegner
• Craig Sost
• Namit Malhotra

Starring

• Chris Pratt
• Samuel L. Jackson
• Hannah Waddingham
• Ving Rhames
• Nicholas Hoult
• Cecily Strong
• Harvey Guillén
• Brett Goldstein
• Bowen Yang
• Snoop Dogg

Edited by

Mark Keefer

Music by

John Debney

Production

companies

• Columbia Pictures[1]
• Alcon Entertainment
• DNEG Animation[a]
• One Cool Group
• Wayfarer Studios
• Stage 6 Films[2]
• Andrews McMeel Entertainment[2]

Distributed by

Sony Pictures Releasing

Release date

• May 24, 2024

Running time

101 minutes[3]

Country

• United States

Language

English

Budget

$60 million

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