The Garfield Movie

otie the goat

Much like Garfield, I too am lazy, so shall this review. This film is boring, forgettable, generic, too long, badly acted, lazily animated, strung together, and ridiculous. Garfield does like lasagna and hates Mondays, so there's that. 4/10 might be able to entertain children.

I grew up watching Garfield, and I can barely remember anything but I know for a fact this isn't my Garfield. Some characters/voice actors like Marge Malone, Otto, Odie, and Jinx are great. They feel like actual kid's TV characters. Then Garfield is Chris Pratt and Vic isn't a cat, and I don't like that. The humour is SNL dad culture and don't know what to think of it. It took a while for me to get into the animation style, I ended up liking it but I'm not sure if most kids would, and the messy pacing doesn't help. It's silly and fun but like the past movies, misses more than hits. Also, why'd this feel like an advertisement?

4.1 - I was never a HUGE Garfield fan but I did read a lot of the comic strip collections as a kid. And this just didn’t feel like classic Garfield to me.

Maybe it was Chris Pratt being too vocally recognizable. Or maybe it was the weirdly complex mix of morals & lessons - crime & family, & loyalty, & abandonment, & revenge - it was just a lot for a kids movie, & would have been better serviced digging deeper into one or two.

The biggest issue I think I have is that it’s just not a property that feels adaptable to a feature length story, like most comic strips, leading it to feel entirely too long. The original humor comes from one liners & snapshots of funny situations, not deeply layered extended stories. I haven’t seen the other Garfield movies, but I feel like that would be an issue I’d have across most, if not all, of them.

And lastly, it just wasn’t that interesting to watch. The animation itself felt dated & stale. The visual gags weren’t particularly funny or fresh. And in addition to Pratt, I didn’t love a lot of the voice castings either.

Definitely not one I’m going to encourage rewatching with future kids.

6.5/10

Fun watch