Garfield: The Movie
dir. Hewitt
Opens Fri June 11
Various Theaters
Based on previews alone, it’s clear the makers of Garfield: The Movie have made two egregious errors. 1) They embarked on this project at all. Since the early ’90s, the comic strip has been the second-worst thing in newspaper syndication, notching just barely above Family Circle. 2) Having decided to turn this rancid turd into a film anyway, they have ignored the only element that makes it even mildly memorable–its bubbly visual style–and made Garfield himself into a truly scary-looking CGI creature with satanic green eyes. Meanwhile, all the other characters, both human and animal, are flesh and blood–including Odie, whose enormous cartoon tongue and perpetual wide-eyed pant remain the only humorous part of the strip. This just looks dumb. They should have vetoed both CGI and live-action, and just animated the entire movie, much like the old Saturday morning cartoon of Garfield, which was actually pretty good.
Still, I went into Garfield: The Movie not expecting to hate it, for I remember a better, darker time… when Garfield was not fat in a cute way, but obese, with little piggy eyes. This early Garfield tore people to shreds and they liked it, and a part of me hoped that in some absurd twist of the normal rules of Hollywood schlock, with the help of Bill Murray’s voice, the makers of Garfield might just channel that badass cat of my youth, at least for a little while.
And amazingly, they kind of do. Murray sounds great as Garfield, and the script doesn’t compromise on making him an asshole. He’s self-centered and mean, and even has a couple pretty adult jokes (in one stupid plot twist, he winds up at the pound, where he proceeds to ask the guards for shoelaces, presumably to hang himself). Now, if they had just fleshed Jon’s (Breckin Meyer) relationship with Garfield into something substantial and not perfunctory for the insipid plot (which isn’t worth relating, trust me), and if Jennifer Love Hewitt wasn’t in the movie at all, and if there hadn’t been a blatant product placement for Pepsi, Wendy’s, and Ford Trucks in EVERY OTHER scene… why Garfield might almost have been slightly okay.