May 29, 2024
Garfield (voiced by Chris Pratt) was a fat, gluttonous, orange tabby cat who lived happily with his master Jon Arbuckle (voiced by Nicholas Hoult) and his beagle dog Odie. One night, Garfield and Odie were kidnapped from Jon's house by two unknown dogs -- a giant shar pei Roland (Brett Goldstein) and a fidgety whippet Nolan (Bowen Yang). They turned out to be the henchmen of Jinx (Hannah Waddingham), a white Persian cat bent on revenge.
In the course of this adventure, Garfield finally got to meet his long-estranged father Vic (Samuel L. Jackson). The last time Garfield saw Vic was that very night that kitten Garfield met the lonely Jon while he was eating alone in a family Italian restaurant. Garfield had long held a bitter grudge on Vic, believing that his father had abandoned him. Meanwhile, Jinx also had a major axe to grind with Vic, and that was why they were all brought together.
This new animated film directed by Mark Dindal is already the second movie about Jim Davis' famous cartoon cat Garfield. The first one was "Garfield: The Movie" (2004), a live-action film that featured the lazy drawl of Bill Murray as the voice of the CGI-Garfield. Davis's comic strip began to take off in the late 1970s. It never really left the comics pages until the present, even if David has long relegated the work to his assistants since the 1990s.
This film was a mishmash of different common tropes seen in other recent animated films. The cutest segment for me was Jon and Garfield's first meeting over pizza and lasagna, as the design of Garfield as a kitten was most adorable. The majority of the film was a heist to carjack a truckload of milk from a theme park -- this was very reminiscent of "Migration" and "Chicken Run 2", both of which also had father-child bonding as its emotional core.
The antagonist Jinx was too over-the-top as her elaborate revenge scheme felt contrived and silly. It was also not made too clear why she had two dogs at her beck and call. The climactic fight scene on the running train (an overused set piece in action films), that followed a kiddy version of the laws of physics. With these new characters dominating the story, Jon was pushed to the sidelines. Those waiting for Liz, Arlene and Nermal will be disappointed. 5/10
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