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…

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