Movie Review: The Garfield Movie is joke-free entertainment for a new generation
Much has already been said here and in other places about the adaptations of characters no longer for the big or small screen but rather what is aimed at the new generations, characters that aim to entertain in a modern world carrying a clearer and more current message about the things they occupy.
The above may or may not work partially, some will be interested and others will think that this has nothing original or new beyond wanting to compete and fill places in a movie theater or be the star of the moment on the list of a streaming platform.
One of these characters was born from the creative mind of Jim Davis in 1976 in a comic strip format originally published locally as Jon and then distributed nationally starting in 1978 as Garfield, a cat who lives intense adventures with his son. human owner Jon Arbuckle and his inseparable companion the dog Odie, a cynical, selfish, boastful character who loves coffee and lasagna, has been liked by locals and strangers over the years, with the 1980s being when he had his greatest popularity worldwide.
The popular comic strips that appeared in newspapers were compiled in 1980, having 79 volumes in a black and white booklet format and the special ones in color. One of the special characteristics they have is that the titles refer to the weight of the feline, The complete collection is titled Garfield Fat Cat, and the Ballantine publishing house has new editions now called Garfield Classics that have been printed and distributed since 2001.
Comic books, posters, t-shirts, folders, notebooks, collectible stuffed animals, stamps, and endless items have been part of their merchandising over the decades, animated series and television specials enjoyed great success among which we can mention Garfield and Friends (1988), The Garfield Show (2009), Garfield Originals (2019) and the specials Here Comes Garfield (1982), Garfield’s Halloween Adventure (1985), Garfield Goes Hollywood (1987), A Garfield Christmas (1987) and Garfield’s Thanksgiving (1989), his time on the big screen was with Garfield: The Movie (2004) by director Peter Hewitt and its sequel Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties (2006) by director Tim Hill.
In 2024, this popular feline has a new opportunity with The Garfield Movie directed by Mark Dindal, a film that promises to be a reinvention of the character with a new origin story and a great adventure.
What is the movie about?
Garfield (Chris Pratt) is a Monday-hating, lasagna-loving house cat who is about to have an adventure in a world away from home, after meeting his long-lost father Vic (Samuel L. Jackson) this cat in the company of his inseparable friend Odie (Harvey Guillén) is forced to abandon the life they know to join Vic and save him from his pursuers to be a family although this has great risk finally.
The idea of adapting a classic character from comic strips and animated series after his previous film failures this has been a great challenge, a character with a defined personality now faces the modern world and the demands of a new generation.
This new animated film based on the comic strip by Jim Davis has been directed by Mark Dindal and written by Paul A. Kaplan, Mark Torgove, and David Reynolds, taking their characters to live a new adventure that tries to be of interest to locals and strangers, Modernity does not always work and there are things to consider among them that the slightest of changes will affect the development of a successful trajectory so that new generations know and probably identify with some of them.
The Garfield Movie tells us a new origin for this cat, the film opens with a small Garfield being abandoned by his father on a rainy afternoon/night where he meets Jon Arbuckle who is having pizza for dinner in a nearby restaurant, to the sympathy of both. This man decides to adopt him take him home and give him a new home in which he will inevitably be the one who dominates and sets the rules for everyone. Years later he reunites with his father Vic, who in reality did not abandon him since in all these years he has been keeping an eye on him, what he wanted was for him to have a chance at life that he couldn’t give him at that moment.
We know very well that this cat Vic is a criminal who has gotten into one problem after another that he must now face to stop escaping and have a peaceful life, but first, he will have to face a new character, Jinx ( Hannah Waddingham) a thief cat who was caught because of Vic and who now intends to make him pay for that time with a big milk theft, with the help of her canine henchmen Roland (Brett Goldstein) and Nolan (Bowen Yang) this villainess will know a side different from his rival having the opportunity to plan better revenge now also against his lost son Garfield.
In this adventure full of craziness and some nostalgic references, Garfield will have to use all his ingenuity to save his father. After the failed milk theft he meets Otto (Ving Rhames), a bull who will help him in exchange for being able to see. his girlfriend and be with her permanently, this conditional treatment will make them realize that the value they have is greater than any of their fears, and overcoming it will give them the ability to stand out on their own in a world that has considered inferior like a domestic animal and a farm animal as well as the importance of helping others face their problems and overcome them.
After half-solving the problem and returning home, they will leave it again to rescue the father who abandons him for the second time after stealing the milk. Garfield understands that his father is a stray cat and a small-time criminal who has always wanted and proof of this are the marks he has left over the years on a tree in front of Jon Arbuckle’s house.
They leave one problem to enter another and things change, in a magnificent sequence aboard a train, Garfield finally saves his father and puts things in order by returning home and inviting his father to be part of his new family along with Jinx’s former henchmen, finally seeing that he can belong to both worlds, the one inside and the one outside the home, that he is so adult and independent that he can live this and more adventures.
In summary, this is the story of Garfield: The movie, a film whose central plot is that of the toxic relationship between a selfish father and a dominant son who thinks and believes that he is the center of the universe and that everything his human pet possesses. It is what he rightfully deserves for being simply Garfield, with this come subplots that involve Otto the Bull, Jinx and his henchmen, and Jon Arbuckle and Odie, the narrative structure sends us from the present to the past in the very helpful flashbacks that we get providing data to understand the situation in general.
Although the film has good and very funny moments, not everything is smooth sailing, the script very conveniently relies almost for the most part on the nostalgia that is left behind to give way to a new personality of this character, from the beginning they establish the rule that Garfield can break the fourth wall by addressing us as the audience and tell us his story in his very own style based on his sympathy for the hedonism and disobedience that determine the morality of his actions and the very poor and not very credible justification of the actions. themselves.
The studio’s interest in presenting a modernized and more current version of a character that is already concretely defined and whom we identify as cynical and amusingly selfish changes here using a new formula and the classic references from which it wants to move away to now have a new one. pleasanter and more entertaining personality that is in line with a new and demanding public that is more conformist every day with what is presented to them, something that cannot innovate on itself and that remains only as something that entertains adults more than the public to which it is originally directed.
This project and its final result confuse the audience, on the one hand, it tries to keep true Garfield fans interested, and on the other hand, it wants to enter the field of current technology through unintentional and poorly focused humor with jokes and jokes. that not everyone will understand if they do not have a prior background of the characters, which makes these sequences feel boring and heavy, the narrative rhythm is so convenient that it goes from something moderately interesting to something that does not have much to do with it and resumes the rhythm To make it fun, with so many changes in such a short time it is intended that we maintain interest and the opposite happens.
The script has flaws, and it is more than clear that this work is completely far from its original material, if something that characterizes this character is his peculiar way of seeing things and how he provides solutions to his problems, it is not the same humor black and cynical and with this, I am not saying that in his comic strips, he intended to educate because that is not his function but it was what gave him that more adult touch very much in the style of Schultz’s Peanuts, these original materials were intended to be for children but they They were understood more by adults, it is very convenient to do it through CGI animation than another version that mixed real action with digital special effects and not because this was cheaper but because the trend now is this type of films.
It is very convenient to fall into a comfort zone that presents a preview of what could be either an animated series in this same format or a new saga of films in which we see new and “renewed” adventures of these characters, another big mistake. and it is where it loses all its essence that these animal characters move their mouths and humanize them more with more human attitudes and movements such as the fact that almost all of them walk on 2 legs, finally, it is worth mentioning that their biggest failure is in the voice cast, we were already used to it and we as an audience already identified what their personality was like.
There are many failures and its script goes more towards the side of the shameless moral discourse that the family is the most important thing, the love of a father for his children, what he is willing or not willing to do for them, family love, inclusive coexistence and acceptance of the consequences of actions and all this aims to semi-educate new audiences and identify with them in the real world, it aims to be a pseudo role model of what the path of the hero is like and the advantages that It’s about being responsible in a highly competitive environment.
The film as such entertains at times but is not a precedent that can promote something more in the future, what the director and screenwriters are proposing is an origin story mixed with an adventure that involves a dysfunctional family environment and an absent villainess with his henchmen and who decides to reduce Garfield’s relationship with the human who adopted him to a minimum along with his relationship with his housemate the dog Odie, this is changed by a supposed adventure that will have ups and downs and a fight between good and evil, between doing what is right and what is not.
In the case of the antagonists, we do not fully understand where she comes from, what she did before, and how she met her henchmen who ultimately redeem themselves and do the right thing. It is also not very clear to us if what they propose is that this Persian cat is the central villain. In other words, the world is full of dangers that a domestic cat has to face, Jinx’s motivations are more cartoonish than something deeper, she is evil because yes, she wants revenge for having been betrayed, yes, but this is not something new, we have seen it countless times in other genres and with other actors in other situations where this can take on importance and relevance for the development of the story, here that does not happen and remains only a bad joke. of a very badly done and very mua ha ha evil.
In the end, we have as a result something lacking in emotion in a subplot of parent-child reconciliation in a climax that aims to move us in the face of the insistent comedy of entanglements and chases to have a result that may be able to keep this forward as a new way of narrating things and to give these characters the unnecessary opportunity to modernize and please everyone, it is evident that their scriptwriters did not understand what this central character was about nor did they know how to develop him, creating a new profile that would please without having to break their own rules.
The situations it poses are very hypocritical in themselves, a cat that can enter and leave a house and pretend that it can fix the world without having consequences for it, it is so comfortable to see that everything is done in favor of a very good animation but nothing impeccable, a palette of colors invented by CGI that show a partially happy world where it doesn’t matter what you do or the means you use to achieve your goal because in the end you will come out ahead and you will be congratulated and loved for it.
Nobody here intends to follow a specific line of events, everything is structured so that these characters work on their own and apart from everything, the problem comes when you put together all these elements that together do not work, it is intended to be as if we were turning the pages of those old strips comics and we will go from one self-contained situation to another and so on until its end where we confirm that this work is only a commercial device that seeks to revive a merchandising franchise for old and new generations.
This is what is annoying and outrageous, that a character who could have had better treatment and who could have preserved his essence and personality is left only at the disposal of a studio that we do not know for how long he can continue to remain in force, it seems that the trend in cinema and this type of films it is about experimenting to see if it works out well for us to continue with other things that involve what it occupies and not to have quality material that can be presented and that exalts its original base in various new ways and contributes something new and enriches what we already know and above all, that we feel attracted once again to this eighties fashion.
Garfield The Movie Voice cast
The cast is made up of Chris Pratt, Samuel Jackson, Hannah Waddingham, Ving Rhames, Nicholas Hoult, Cecily Strong, Harvey Guillén, Brett Goldstein, Bowen Yang, and Snoop Dogg and once again we turn to the old and reliable they did what they could with what they had, voices that are good but do not quite fit the profile of the characters and the version dubbed into Spanish better not even talk, tries to emulate a popular folklore where every joke is transformed into something with a double meaning that does not cause the slightest thank you.
Who composed the soundtrack?
The soundtrack composed by John Debney, who has had successful works for films such as Hocus Pocus, End of Days, Sin City, and The Jungle Book, falls far short of what was expected, the musical pieces are not a complement to accompany the sequences, here everything is heard and seen separately, each thing on its own, as independent material or for an action movie it would be better placed, in this case it doesn’t work.
In conclusion, The Garfield Movie 2024 is one of many animated projects in which time, money, effort and talent have been wasted. If this is intended to be the beginning of something more like a saga of new films or a series for some streaming platforms have started in the wrong direction, a product that entertains but that is not going to be distinguished by being something famous neither for new nor for old generations, it is something that in the media is left in favor of time and the audience decides whether or not this can continue or that it remains as one more example that there are characters that should not be modernized just to satisfy the need of some studios to remain relevant in an industry that is increasingly sinking.
Garfield The Movie is now available in movie theaters.
