Okay, look. I love Garfield immensely. Growing up, for reasons I can’t truly fathom, the Garfield strip was my favorite. I had dozens of the books collecting the strips, even the ones from the 70s that didn’t make sense to a kid. The classic Garfield that stuck to your car window? We had it! I believe my plush Garfield that I slept with still sits in my Mom’s house. Garfield and Friends was a great cartoon. Garfield was big in my childhood.
That said…there’s no reason for Garfield to be getting a movie now. The more recent cartoons have been unimpressive, and the strip was never really deep. There’s only so many “I hate Mondays”/”let’s bully Odie”/”Jon is a creep to the hot vet” jokes you can make.
I was a bit surprised when my daughter suggested The Garfield Movie for our delayed birthday movie outing. Y’all, this movie is a mess, and I don’t know who it’s made for. Garfield (with, *sigh* Chris Pratt as his voice) only sort of resembles the cat from the comic strip if you squint. Kids will find the convoluted plots unintelligible. Garfield’s Dad, Vic (voiced by Samuel L. Jackson) comes back into his life! But gets him caught up in a milk heist he has to do for Jynx (Hannah Waddingham) who’s trying her best Yzma (unsurprising since director Mark Dindal’s most highly regarded previous credit is The Emperor’s New Groove). Every heist movie cliche gets rolled out, from the plan drawn in the dirt, to a training montage, and ending up in “the one place you can’t go!”. Added to the already messy heist plot and daddy issues is a bull voiced by Ving Rhames who wants back in to the target dairy to rescue his girl.
What we’re left with is a movie that too serious for kids, and too dumb for adults. It’s also an affront to the parents who actually remember how Garfield used to be. Yeah, abusing Odie isn’t something that would really fly today, but if the end result is this complicated and anti-nostalgic, just leave it alone. No one would’ve missed this, and it stings just a bit more when The Garfield Movie makes it to theaters while other films are getting shelved for tax breaks. Perhaps it was the absolutely rampant product placement that allowed this to be finished? I assume Olive Garden gets points on the backend the way they were mentioned.
I’m going to do something a little different when I look at rating a kid-centric movie. Introducing the P-MTR! It stands for Parent Movie Tolerance Rating, or “P Meter”. It’s a simple 1 to 10 scale that let’s you know if you, the parent, will enjoy the movie. The 1 end of the scale houses atrocities such as Thomas and the Magic Railroad or the Baby Geniuses series, while the other end would have family faves like Megamind or The Lego Movie. Sadly, The Garfield Movie is a 2 on the P-MTR. Very little humor that got more than a chuckle out of me, and the scenes that were supposed to be heartwarming left me cold.
PS: I’m trying not to be excessively negative but seriously stop hiring Chris Pratt and other celebrity voices, especially for what are basically cameo parts. He’s already Mario and Star-Lord, isn’t that enough?
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