Review: Garfield


Jon (Breckin Meyer) agrees to care for a cute dog named Odie so that he can get closer to adorable vet Jennifer Love Hewitt. Jon’s other pet, title lasagne-loving fat cat, is of course incredibly jealous and annoyed by his new housemate, but when Odie runs away and is nabbed by the cruel TV personality Happy Chapman (Stephen Tobolowsky), he starts to feel guilty. 

 

The CGI FX, whilst unrealistic (and not meshing with the real life humans or animals), were better than I expected, the human and voice casting seemed excellent on paper, and I like and am familiar with the source material. There was only one thing missing from this 2004 Peter Hewitt (the much better “Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey”) film: Humour. This is a harmless, but totally humourless, pretty clichéd family film when it could’ve been good, sarcastic fun (This film’s idea of funny? An end credits Murray-as-Garfield rendition of an overused James Brown song. Yawn!).

 

Bill Murray, with the possible exception of Steven Wright, is the perfect choice for the voice of the lazy fat cat, but if there’s nothing funny for him to say in the script, what can he do? Similarly, Hewitt’s immensely likeable screen presence is perfect for this sort of thing (perfect for anything. Really. She’s perfect in every way and I’m not a creepy stalker at all), but she is given absolutely nothing to do, and very little to say. Tobolowsky is a perfectly hateful villain, but he’s given far too little screen time.

 

Just read the funny pages instead, folks because there’s definitely scant humour in this big-screen adaptation of a comic classic. The screenplay is by Joel Cohen and Alec Sokolow (co-writers of “Toy Story” and another innocuous but unfunny family comedy, “Cheaper By the Dozen”) from the beloved Jim Davis comic strip. Really disappointing.

 

Rating: D+

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