Review: 'The Garfield Movie' treats America's favorite fat feline like just another cat

I can’t think of the last time I saw a movie as bland and generic as “The Garfield Movie,” which crunches Jim Davis’ misanthropic comic-strip cat into one more piece of pre-digested intellectual property. 

The first sign of this movie’s lack of imagination is the casting of Chris Pratt as the orange cat with the lasagna fixation. Once upon a time, Pratt brought a naive charm to the voice work on “The Lego Movie.” But as was apparent with “The Super Mario Bros. Movie,” Pratt has become a name producers write down to voice the main character until they can think of somebody better — and then forget to think of somebody better.

Unfortunately, the same can be said of Samuel L. Jackson, who provides the voice here to Garfield’s wayward father, Vic. Jackson is a gifted actor with a legendary career, so it’s up to him whether he phones in a voice performance like this.

In the movie’s prologue, the kitten Garfield is abandoned in an alley, but follows his nose to an Italian restaurant — where he finds Jon Arbuckle (voiced by Nicholas Hoult) dining alone. The two bond instantly, over their shared loneliness and Garfield’s discovery of pizza, spaghetti and lasagna. Soon, Garfield makes a home for himself with Jon and his other pet, Odie, who quickly becomes the cat’s 24-hour servant. (Harvey Guillen performs the “voice” of the nonverbal dog.)

Then two thuggish dogs — Roland (voiced by “Ted Lasso’s” Brett Goldstein) and Nolan (voiced by “Saturday Night Live’s” Bowen Yang) — kidnap Garfield and Odie, on the orders of Jinx (voiced by Hannah Waddingham, another “Ted Lasso” alum). Jinx, she reveals in her villain monologue, is after Vic, who used to lead the criminal gang that Jinx ran with, until she got caught and spent years in the pound. Jinx wants Vic, Garfield and Odie, to finish the heist that got her caught: Stealing thousands of gallons of milk from a high-security dairy operation.

When Garfield gets there, he tries to befriend Otto (voiced by Ving Rhames), an aging bull who’s one-half of the dairy’s trademark logo. The other half, Ethel, is locked up tightly within the dairy’s industrial operation — so Otto agrees to help Garfield, Odie and Vic steal a milk truck if they help free Ethel.

It’s abundantly clear early into the story that this movie has wandered far afield of everything we know about the character of Garfield. Very little is said, outside the opening narration, of the cartoon cat’s laziness, or his disdain for his human and his dog — and his infamous hatred of Mondays is raised awkwardly in the dialogue and just as quickly forgotten.

Director Mark Dindal — who hasn’t helmed a movie since “Chicken Little” in 2005 — and a trio of credited writers serve up a few good laughs here and there. But they, and the plot, could have been about any random cat character, not the grumbling, sleep-deprived hater of cute kittens and Mondays that we’ve grown up to love. This is not my Garfield (and finding out that I had a Garfield is disturbing). 

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‘The Garfield Movie’

★★

Opens Friday, May 24, at theaters everywhere. Rated PG for action/peril and mild thematic elements. Running time: 101 minutes.