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Garfield the cat is no stranger to animated adaptations. Voiced first by Lorenzo Music and then Bill Murray , in Mark Dindal’s The Garfield Movie he’s voiced by current universal cartoon character actor, Chris Pratt . In this film, Garfield’s history is fleshed out with an origin story that turns into a heist film.

Garfield is reunited with his long lost father Vic ( Samuel L. Jackson ) and is conscripted by the evil Jinx (Hannah Waddingham) into a plot to steal milk from Lactose Farms with the help of Otto the bull ( Ving Rhames ), an exiled mascot. The Garfield Movie is, for a 3D animation, quite visually faithful to Jim Davis’ comics, using an appropriately simple style.



Sadly, that’s where the fidelity ends. Chris Pratt is a good actor, but as written and performed, this film’s Garfield is not the dry, acerbic curmudgeon of the comics or prior animated versions, but rather a high-energy “wacky” sort of cartoon character that happens to like foods similar to ones that Garfield likes. The film’s one success in terms of humour is Odie, who is a silent jack-of-all-trades completely upstaging Garfield, but even this is a departure from the gormlessness of the original character.

You might ask, smugly, if Garfield is a comic with any complexities worth preserving as long as the movie has other redeeming features, but it’s there that the film lets you down too. So generic is everything about The Garfield Movie that it’s impossible not to wonder if it’s th.

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