The Garfield Movie review: This cartoon cat’s bizarrely tragic origin story has to be seen to be believed

Garfield has been cured of his depression. Good news for Garfield, I guess. Less so for anyone hoping his new animated film might in any way reflect Jim Davis’s original, misanthropic feline. As featured in what was once the world’s most widely syndicated comic strip, Garfield is supposed to provide pleasantly bland, sardonic humour for adults, while simultaneously introducing children to what would one day become their own perpetual state of ennui.

Garfield hates Mondays, because so does anyone engaged in the corporate death drive. He also loves lasagne, because melted cheese is one of the last, pure pleasures in life. And yet, in Hollywood’s latest attempt to cash in on the brand, Sony’s animated The Garfield Movie, he’s barely a curmudgeon. As voiced by Chris Pratt, he’s a shapeless, charmless box-ticking exercise of popular animation trends collided with moneymaking opportunities.

Now that “the tragic backstory” has become a cheap narrative shortcut to respectability, Garfield’s affection for lasagne is really a trauma response from when he was abandoned as a kitten outside of an Italian restaurant. And instead of Garfield’s gluttony being a cute quirk, we’re forced to spend an entire movie reckoning with the possibility this cat may, in fact, have developed a serious eating disorder. His hatred of Mondays, too, can’t just be for the fun of it, either – it’s now strictly because it’s the day his owner, Jon (Nicholas Hoult) takes him to the vet or gives him a bath.

In fact, The Garfield Movie is stuffed with enough tragic backstories to make a therapist rich. When we meet Garfield’s absentee father, Vic (Samuel L Jackson), he has a sob story we see in flashback. When we meet the villain, Persian cat Jinx (Hannah Waddingham), who kidnaps Garfield in order to enact vengeance on her ex-partner-in-crime Vic, she has a sob story we see in flashback. Garfield and Vic are forced to team up, with Jon’s dog and Garfield’s “unpaid intern” Odie (Harvey Guillén) in tow, and rob an industrial farm in order to repay Vic’s debts to Jinx. There, they meet Otto (Ving Rhames), one of the farm’s bovine mascots, who (surprise!), has a sob story we see in flashback.

It’s a hollow stab at the kind of emotional maturity that other recent animated films have done well (say, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse or Puss in Boots: The Last Wish) – copied from those examples, too, are the stretches of 2D animation. Then there’s the babyfied Garfield, who is 80 per cent eyeballs and created for the sake of the merchandise department. And, last but worst, there’s the avalanche of product placement: Popchips, Olive Garden, the Walmart app, and a staunchly pro-drone stance.

Pratt’s performance as Garfield is much the same as his performance as Mario in last year’s The Super Mario Bros Movie – just one part of Hollywood’s ongoing plan to miscast him at every opportunity, despite how obviously he’s suited to himbo roles (even in the animated sphere, he was infinitely funnier as Emmet in The Lego Movie). Garfield is a character who’s always sounded like Bill Murray, even when not being voiced by Bill Murray, as he was in the 2000s live-action films. But, then again, who knows what this Garfield is meant to be. He’s no more substantial than a walking billboard.

Dir: Mark Dindal. Starring: Chris Pratt, Samuel L Jackson, Hannah Waddingham, Ving Rhames, Nicholas Hoult, Cecily Strong, Harvey Guillén, Brett Goldstein, Bowen Yang, Snoop Dogg. U, 101 mins

‘The Garfield Movie’ is in cinemas from 24 May