There have been a few attempts to turn Jim Davis’ comic strip Garfield into a feature film. We had a 2004 live-action/animation hybrid (which spawned a sequel) starring Bill Murray as the titular Monday-hating lasagna loving feline, and that reception was not positive. Mark Dindal, perhaps best known for directing Disney’s The Emperor’s New Groove, was tapped by Sony Pictures a year-ish ago to bring a new Garfield movie to audiences.

The Garfield Movie shows our beloved feline’s origin story and how he adopted Jon (Nicholas Hoult) who spoils him and his canine sidekick Odie rotten.  One night, Garfield and Odie are kidnapped by mysterious figures, inadvertently reuniting Garfield with his father Vic (Samuel L. Jackson), after not seeing him since being seemingly abandoned as a kitten. A villainous Persian cat (Hannah Waddingham) wants revenge against Vic, and sends the father-son duo (and Odie) on a perilous and wacky mission where they finally get to know each other for the first time.

The biggest problem The Garfield Movie has is right in the center. We have Chris Pratt doing the iconic feline’s voice. Pratt is so horribly miscast and sticks out like a sore thumb here. As with his voice performance in The Super Mario Bros. Movie, his line readings are always a little bit off. He has no enthusiasm for what he’s doing, and that should be fine for a deadpan character like Garfield, but Pratt just sounds smug, and I think it’s time we stop hiring him for jobs like this. I can think of a handful of performers off the top of my head who would be better for this, none of whom would carry the movie-star price tag Pratt no doubt demands.

Otherwise, The Garfield Movie should be easy to appeal to the very young children to whom it is aimed. There’s lots of goofy, slapstick-y, scatological humor that, to be fair, most of the time didn’t work for me, but there are individual bits that do work, and feel like they’re right out of a comic strip. Those are individual moments in a feature length story that doesn’t really hold shape for the duration. The kind of fun, offbeat energy we have in the beginning is hard to keep up for an hour and 40 minutes. The film wears out its welcome rather quickly. 

We have some good voice work elsewhere from people like Samuel L. Jackson, Cecily Strong, Bowen Yang, Ving Rhames, Hannah Waddingham and Snoop Dogg (as a cat), but the best efforts of those performers further prove that Chris Pratt was the wrong man for the job here. There’s a lot of dead space, laughs that don’t land and an insane amount of product placement for an animated movie. We have name-drops of Walmart, Sony, Olive Garden, among others. Also Garfield obsessively watches “Catflix”, which is just a collection of cat videos an intern probably scooped up during a TikTok binge, and now they’re part of this incredibly lazy film. And I would like to make it clear – I am a cat person, this should all work for me! And yet, there is so much cynicism and corporate greed that brings to your attention the cash-grab factor lingering over this entire endeavor. If there’s an excuse to slap Garfield’s face on some T-shirts, the suits in charge don’t care if the product they’re selling audiences is borderline trash.

The screenplay by Paul A. Kaplan, Mark Torgrove and David Reynolds is straining to stretch this thing out to the length of a feature film. At least the animation mostly looks nice. In the end though, The Garfield Movie is telling kind of a sweet story. I do feel like the children the film is aimed at will appreciate it, but the adult fans of this timeless character might be a bit bored. It also feels like enough material for a 30-minute TV special instead of a nearly two hour feature film.