The Garfield Movie Review: As Entertaining As A Monday Without Lasagna

While watching "The Garfield Movie," the second attempt to transport the lasagna-loving, Monday-hating feline to the big screen, one thought went through my mind: is this a fundamentally unadaptable IP? Jim Davis' comic strip has been going strong since 1978, but its gag-a-day format doesn't neatly translate to a narrative that runs longer than a handful of panels. It's the rare example of a character who is universally known and beloved because of a lack of character development — he has been, and will always be, a simple fat cat who is an absolute nuisance to his owner. Anything beyond that would be, in comedic terms, putting a hat on a hat; the strip endures because of a simplicity that translates incredibly well around the world.

It would be impossible to stay true to that within any feature length adaptation, so it's no shock that "The Garfield Movie" doesn't even try to sustain itself on the simple charms of the source material; it's even less of a surprise that expanding beyond the limited scope of the comic strip's world will leave many wishing that the movie was much smaller in scale.

Initially, it looks like we're getting a feature-length origin story of how the orange tabby (Chris Pratt) wound up living with owner Jon Arbuckle (Nicholas Hoult) and beagle best friend Odie (Harvey Guillen) after a brief introduction, but we flash back to the present day shortly after for a high stakes kidnapping plot.

The pets are kidnapped from their kitchen by the two canine henchmen of Persian cat Jinx (Hannah Waddingham), which via an elaborate string of events, leads their paths towards Garfield's estranged father Vic (Samuel L. Jackson), with whom they must team up on a dairy farm heist. In short, you'd be physically incapable of condensing the mere set-up of this narrative within a three-panel strip, with director Mark Dindal — a Disney veteran who hasn't helmed a movie since 2005's "Chicken Little"; consider this his long-awaited parole from director jail — and his screenwriters convoluting the source material's simple charms to the extent it's barely recognizable as a "Garfield" story. The world of Jim Davis' comic strip is a hermetically sealed one; a mundane suburbia, frozen in time and unburdened by any overt cultural ties to the real world. A "Garfield" strip from 40 years ago could be mistaken for one from five years ago, as there will never be direct references within the panels to the latest headlines, or pop culture phenomena which could age them. This is an approach the movie doesn't share, which wouldn't be a problem if the pop culture gags within weren't lazy.

There is one exception to this, as Garfield and Vic's heist is co-ordinated by Otto, a bull voiced by Ving Rhames, who is all but reprising his role as hacker Luther Stickell from the "Mission: Impossible" franchise – you half expect him to start calling other characters Ethan after he gives them detailed instructions via headset. It's the only gag aimed at any parents watching that doesn't bend over backwards to call out what it's referencing, which isn't to say the film is fully restrained. The famous theme song to that franchise briefly overpowers the score in one moment, and in another, Pratt's feline breaks the fourth wall to claim that only he and Tom Cruise do their own stunts, and that's just to name the moments in which "Mission: Impossible" gets called out in the screenplay. Kids' movies referencing older works that children in the audience won't have seen is hardly new, but each pop culture nod is inserted without any punchline to justify its inclusion. The reference is the extent of the joke, as if it were a placeholder in an early draft of the screenplay to be worked into something sharper just before production, which none of the three credited screenwriters (one of whom, David Reynolds, co-wrote "Finding Nemo" — you'd never guess from this) got around to doing.

As for jokes with recognizable punchlines, the writers fail to evolve beyond using puns with the word "cat", such as Jon reading "The Great Catsby," or Garfield's streaming service of choice being "Catflix." Little effort has been put into the wordplay of sight gags, all of which suggests a glaring lack of interest from both the writing and animated teams, as well as the director himself, in adding depth to their world — let alone valuing the intelligence of a young audience they don't seem to think can handle more than non-specific cat puns. Hell, they could change the name of Garfield's favorite streaming site to "Petflix"; not exactly the densest gag, but would at least show they were inspired to do more than just copy the same punchline repeatedly.

Due to circumstances entirely out of the creative team's control, a plot about a group of animals breaking into a farm is a path recently trodden by "Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget," another attempt to reintroduce familiar animated characters for a new generation. That belated sequel may have been inferior to the 2000 original, but still felt like a breath of fresh air among the recent crop of children's films, recapturing the first movie's ability to entertain young and old audiences in unison; even if kids wouldn't get the nods to "The Great Escape," the screenplay was funny enough in its own right to hardly matter. It's a comparison that only makes "The Garfield Movie" look worse, jumping back and forth between trying to entertain parents and their children, never managing to land a single gag that could please both.

I wouldn't be surprised to discover that non-English language dubs of the film were far sharper, catering to audience members of all ages equally — or at the very least, not taking their young audience's less demanding sensibilities for granted. If I seem hung up on this gripe, it's largely because the slapstick physical comedy is frequently inventive, with its best moments — such as a convoluted method to get Garfield onboard a moving train — showing clear influence from the most manic scenes in classic "Looney Tunes" shorts. Those are simple pleasures that, like the original "Garfield" strips, play well to audiences of any age. In trying to reinvent the lazy feline for modern kids, the filmmakers have lost track of the comedic tone that has helped these simple, gag-driven stories endure for decades.

"The Garfield Movie" premieres in theaters on May 24.