Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Garfield Movie’ on VOD, a Brutal Monday of a Kiddie Movie

Purists will bellow BLASPHEMY at The Garfield Movie (now streaming on VOD services like Amazon Prime Video) while proponents of personal progress may hail it for pushing the title cat character far outside his comfort zone – you can’t please everyone, I guess. This is the third movie spotlighting the popular comic strip feline (hey, remember when newspaper comics could launch franchises? Wild times, wild times) known for being a laconic, chronic lasagna-eater, but it blazes new trails by delving into his origin story, and being his first all-animated outing (the previous two blended cartoons with live action, and famously featured Bill Murray as the voice of Garfield). Thus, significantly, we see Baby Kitty Garfield (get your AWWWWWs oiled and ready), and we meet his father, who drags him on a wild adventure that’s absolutely nothing like the comic strip, which was wholly about what a lazy wad of nearly immobile lipids he is. Do we need this? Or any of the many products keenly placed throughout this movie? Probably not.

THE GARFIELD MOVIE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Garfield (Chris Pratt) talks to the camera in this movie. Does it right off the bat. He also used to direct-address us through the comic strip panels, but that’s where the comparison in media formats pretty much ends, because the movie flashes back to the time when Garfield’s father Vic (Samuel L. Jackson, for crying out loud) left him in an alley, out of which our boy wandered and met his adopter, Jon (Nicholas Hoult), in an Italian restaurant where Garfield learned to appreciate the savory flavors of lasagna. It’s a real bull-in-a-china-shop kind of scene. Since then, Garfield has settled into a life of suburban complacency like so many of us have – rarely leaving the house, ordering moronic amounts of food via takeout app, sitting in front of the TV, being friends with a dog, etc. 

Wait, friends with a dog? Yes, in this particular Garfield, Garfield is pals with Odie, who exists to be manipulated. Garfield calls the pup his “unpaid intern.” Notably, Odie isn’t a drooling dipstick; he’s even potentially smarter than Garfield, which is like a Tom and Jerry movie where the cat and mouse don’t pound on each other with cast-iron skillets and peen hammers. We’re subject to a montage-y sequence that runs through a lot of the familiar gags from the comic – rampant eating, rampant sleeping, busting the scale at the vet, hating Mondays, the pie-in-the-face splut without the actual splut sound, sigh – and wraps with Garfield concluding that his life is “a perfect souffle.” 

And right on cue, that souffle is deflated when the plot starts happening to him. One night after raiding the fridge that’s populated with a takeout box bearing the logo of a prominent chain restaurant, Garfield and Odie are kidnapped by two grotesque dogs and dragged to an abandoned mall. As Jon panics and participates in a running gag where he waits on hold for eons with the lost-pet hotline, Garfield is reunited with Vic, who, for reasons too annoying and pointless to get into here, drags his boy and Odie along with him to heist a milk truck from a dairy farm, and settle a debt with his old compatriot Jinx (Hannah Waddingham). This type of caper very much goes against Garfield’s typical M.O., thus inspiring the following line: “Definitely a Monday,” Garfield laments.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Consider 2015’s The Peanuts Movie, which blasphemed by 3-D animating eternally 2-D cartoon/comic strip characters, and by not leaving Charlie Brown eternally downtrodden. It’s still more charming than The Garfield Movie, though.

Performance Worth Watching Hearing: Snoop Dogg voice-cameoing as a cat? Now I’ve seen heard it all!

Memorable Dialogue: OK, this bit made me chuckle:

Vic: You ever jumped a train?

Garfield: I’ve never jumped.

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: LET IT BE KNOWN that Heathcliff, the other comic strip about a naughty orange cat, not only predates Garfield by five years, but also established Heathcliff’s father as a ne’er-do-well alley-cat type (an escaped convict, to be precise), in contrast to his son’s domesticity. I’m not inferring anything here necessarily. I’m just looking for an excuse to recommend reading current Heathcliff panels because they’re admirably, infuriatingly strange where all things Garfield are benign and flavorless (with the exception of that one strip where Jon accidentally drinks dog semen, and if you don’t believe me, look it up). 

And yes, The Garfield Movie belongs in that sweeping generalization. It may not adhere to the core tenets of the character – he’s best known as a cat with a deeply sedentary lifestyle and resistance to any physical exertion beyond consuming food, channel-flipping and occasionally booting Odie off the line that runs horizontally through the panel and represents a table or countertop or something – but it still remains well within the boundaries of animated films that kowtow to children with cutesy antics and simple sentiments, with the occasional joke aimed at adults who will deem the movie rather tiresome after about 20 minutes. For a movie that’s supposed to be about an animal that’s more like an overstuffed hassock than an actual cat, it’s shockingly manic in tone and tempo.

Beneath the nonstop slapstick antics and a can’t-they-just-easily-get-out-of-this-plot plot, the movie is essentially about a son repairing his relationship with his estranged father. You may just shed a tear as Garfield and Vic find a way to let water flow beneath the bridge and get on with loving each other. Very nice. Sweet, even. But getting in the way are the following: A yak character who reminds me of the Bear Man from the Coen Bros.’ True Grit crossed with the styracosaurus from The Good Dinosaur; various extraneous characters; endless food jokes; a ridiculous action sequence involving cheese-fondue volcanos; upsetting amounts of product placement; the occasional dip into spy-movie spoofery, including multiple Tom Cruise references in a final action-packed sequence that’s too Mission: Impossible for its own good; rampant fourth-wall breaking; and end credits punctuated with random cat memes. Oh, and Chris Pratt doing Garfield in Chris Pratt’s voice – at least Bill Murray made sense. Splut: Wait for Netflix.

Our Call: Is it Tuesday yet? SKIP IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.