While this incarnation of the tubby orange tabby sounds like Chris Pratt rather than Murray, he still loves lasagne, hates Mondays and prides himself on being an elite-level loafer. Garfield’s leisurely mastery of his domestic domain extends to breaking the fourth wall while his drippy owner Jon (voiced by Nicholas Hoult) and puppyish sidekick Odie cater to his sultan-like levels of selfishness.
Perhaps wisely The Garfield Movie unmoors its lead from his mollycoddled life by quickly kidnapping him away from it. It is all because of the wayward father who abandoned him as a kitten five years ago.
The square-shouldered, unkempt Vic is a disreputable but amiable crook voiced by Samuel L Jackson, and much is made of the difference between dad’s streetwise outdoor cat life and Garfield’s gilded indoor cage of near-constant pizza delivery.
Vic is in serious hock to a vengeful Persian cat crime boss named Jinx (Hannah Waddingham) whose lavish necklace of mood rings telegraphs her volcanic temper. To get out from under her paw, Vic and his reluctant sidekicks Garfield and Odie must rob a far-off milk farm whose cutesy rustic exterior disguises a grim industrial operation of automated conveyer belts and aggressive security systems.
Their inside man is an old bull who has been put out to pasture nearby. This beefy beast is voiced by Mission: Impossible mainstay Ving Rhames, so of course there is an elaborate planning briefing before the milk heist is executed.
The soulful bull also has a wise plan to help Vic and Garfield get over the resentments that have built up over the past five years. By the time the robbery is in full antic swing, the father and son seem to be achieving some sort of belated rapprochement.
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But mature life lessons being learned amid an Aardman-lite factory heist also feels like we have wandered far away from whatever made Garfield so globally popular in the first place.
At least the stylised aesthetic is sharp enough to evoke the familiar clean lines and huge eyes of Davis’s original artwork but rubbery enough to allow the action sequences to crank up to literally cartoonish levels, including a climactic high-speed train showdown over a deep Roadrunner-style canyon. There is also a cameo from Snoop Dogg voicing a street cat, which is a good joke.
But at no point does anything truly spark to life. I love a dumbass Despicable Me movie or an emotionally wrenching Pixar film. But despite some thinking out of the box, The Garfield Movie does not make a particularly convincing case for its existence. Perhaps Garfield should stick to his more natural habitats, like appearing in a classic three-panel comic strip or being shonkily printed onto a cheap grey sweatshirt you foolishly consider buying while backpacking.
The Garfield Movie is in cinemas from 24 May.
Graeme Virtue is a film and TV critic.
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