THE GARFIELD MOVIE ★½
(G) 101 minutes
There is no corrupting Garfield because he never had any integrity to speak of. When everyone’s favourite plus-sized orange house cat hit the big time in the 1980s, part of his novelty lay in his lack of any traits deeper than a craving for lasagne, a loathing of Mondays and a snarky point of view.
Garfield (voiced by Chris Pratt) in The Garfield Movie.Credit: Sony Pictures
Here was the perfect hero for the Me Decade, in contrast to the hippie-era soul-searching of the Peanuts gang. His indolence fit especially well into the shrunken space of the modern newspaper comic strip, where he would commonly sit around for three or four panels doing very little, as he still does today.
This minimalism has long translated smoothly to TV animation, but for better or worse, a few tweaks have been made in Mark Dindal’s The Garfield Movie (not to be confused with Garfield: The Movie, a live-action-animation hybrid released in 2004, in which Bill Murray voiced our feline friend).
The new big-screen Garfield is still a glutton for dairy products, and still not keen on getting out of the house. But he’s a significantly more upbeat, energetic personality (his voice is supplied by Chris Pratt, sounding only mildly different from his take on Mario in The Super Mario Bros. Movie).
Indeed, his entire household has been given a makeover of sorts. His owner Jon (Nicholas Hoult) is less of a pathetic nerd, more of a kindly benefactor, and Odie the dog (Harvey Guillen) has gone from drooling cretin to repository of Zen wisdom, albeit still expressed through wordless yapping.
John (voiced by Nicholas Hoult) with baby Garfield in The Garfield Movie.Credit: Sony Pictures
God help us, the movie even has an arc that sees Garfield addressing the psychological issues underlying his food addiction and lack of motivation, most of them linked to Vic (Samuel L. Jackson) the lowlife dad who abandoned him as a kitten.
The chance to work through their differences comes when they’re kidnapped by Jinx (Hannah Waddingham), a villainous Persian cat who wants them for a heist at a high-tech dairy farm. As if the plot didn’t incorporate enough father figures, they’re trained for this task by the farm’s former mascot, a gruff bull named Otto (Ving Rhames; yes, this is some kind of Pulp Fiction reunion).