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The Garfield Movie Movie Review

The Garfield Movie is a 2024 animated adventure comedy film directed by Mark Dindal and starring Chris Pratt. It’s a giant waste of time and a clear character assassination.

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“And that’s why we should go

from Sunday to Tuesday“

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After an unexpected reunion with his long-lost father, the street cat Vic, Garfield is forced to leave his very comfortable life with his owner behind. Together with Vic and Odie, he plans a crazy robbery. As a big fan of the Garfield comics that I grew up on, I was thoroughly disappointed with this animated feature adaptation. It’s not like the source material at all.

I don’t have any issues with Chris Pratt being in this role. Yes, he is overly used for so many of these animated characters and famous ones at that, but he fitted the role solidly and he played up the snarky moments well. My problem with the character is that he is supposed to be lazy and uninterested in moving and yet they’ve given him a heist to go on.

This is pretty much another heist action cartoon and we’ve had so many of those by this point. Whenever the filmmakers are out of ideas, they resort to the lazy and boring spy/heist shtick. It did not work and, in fact, I was bored out of my mind watching it. The storyline was quite poor, the emotional manipulation did not work as the characters weren’t likable or developed enough and the villains were these tedious stereotypes. The voice acting is fine, but the characters themselves were atrocious.

Odie and John are underutilized, which was sad to witness. Garfield himself started off strong, but then his arc quickly lost steam. The introduction of his father and this entire adventure that they go on was highly unnecessary and not interesting whatsoever. I did find the animation to be serviceable, but the character designs are standard and the CGI look did not fully work. I would have gone with a simpler, comic-book feel to it.

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I did like that first act or so. The meeting of the two was so charming and moving, but we saw all of those moments in the trailer already, so the movie itself had nothing more interesting to offer. And we did not need an origin story for this iconic character. We just needed some fun humor, which we did not get in this poorly written script with bad dialogue and terrible characterization.