‘The Garfield Movie’ Review: This Feels Like Too Much Effort

Since Garfield’s debut in the 1970s, Jim Davis’s orange tabby has become one of the most successful brands to evolve from the humble American comic strip. And fortified by a reliable stream of cartoon shows, video games and a couple of bland Bill Murray-voiced films in the early 2000s, Garfield is now one of the more enduring images of the American imagination.

Even if you’ve never consumed Garfield in any prolonged form, you probably know who he is and what he represents. (Mondays: reviled. Lasagna: beloved. Effort of any kind: a fundamental misunderstanding of life.)

It’s particularly odd, then, that the latest iteration of the Garfield empire, the animated “The Garfield Movie,” somehow doesn’t. The film, directed by Mark Dindal, is an inert adaptation that mostly tries to skate by on its namesake. In other words, it’s a Garfield movie that strangely doesn’t feel as if Garfield as we know him is really there at all.

Part of this can be attributed to the voice — Chris Pratt, an overly spunky casting choice that was doomed from the start — but there’s also a built-in defect to the very concept of the big-screen Garfield treatment. An animated, animal-centric children’s movie tends to require a narrative structure of action-packed adventure, — the antithesis of Garfield the cat’s raison d’être.

Instead, after a perfunctory origin story of Garfield’s life with his owner, Jon (Nicholas Hoult), and dog companion, Odie (Harvey Guillén), the film is quickly set into adventure mode when Garfield and Odie are kidnapped by a pair of henchman dogs working for a vengeful cat named Jinx (Hannah Waddingham). Garfield’s estranged father, Vic (Samuel L. Jackson), quickly comes to the rescue, but it’s Vic that Jinx is really after. After Jinx demands a truck full of milk as payment for a botched job she took the fall for, Vic, with Garfield and Odie in tow, are off to find a way to pay his debt.