'The Garfield Movie' review: full of inside jokes and action

Since 1978, cartoonist Jim Davis has explored the everyday dramas of pet ownership through the daily travails of the beleaguered Jon Arbuckle, his anxious dog, Odie, and the titular chubby orange tabby, Garfield. If the comic strip (the most widely distributed in the world) is the weekly sitcom version of his story, then “The Garfield Movie,” the latest effort to bring Garfield to the big screen, is an action movie. and oversized adventures, packed with references and comparisons to Tom Cruise.

Those Cruise-inspired Easter eggs aren't necessarily put for kids but for the adults who accompanied them to the theater, like when the score references “Mission: Impossible” while an ox named Otto, voiced by Ving Rhames (who plays Cruise's technician). Luther in the action franchise), exposes the plan for a heist. Later, a triumphant climax with mid-air food delivery drones offers the opportunity for a bit of the “Top Gun” theme, as Garfield (voiced by Chris Pratt) boasts that he does his own stunts, “just like than Tom Cruise.”

The line emphasizes a little too much that this is the big, exciting version of Garfield, not a “Jeanne Dielman”-style study of domestic life. In fact, after a quick frame showing us Garfield's heartwarming story as a hungry stray kitten who encounters Jon at an Italian restaurant, the film progresses through a quick montage of our favorite Garfield tropes: he loves lasagna, hates Mondays, torments. Jon and manipulates Odie.

We know him, we love him: Garfield's unique features have been printed on coffee mugs for years. Now, let's move on to the highly contrived and high-stakes plot. Garfield and Odie are kidnapped by a pair of bully puppies, Nolan (Bowen Yang) and Roland (Brett Goldstein), who work for a Persian cat named Jinx (Hannah Waddingham). She wants them to collaborate with Garfield's deadbeat dad, Vic (Samuel L. Jackson), on a milk theft as revenge for the time he spent in the pound after a plan she and Vic hatched.

The heist plot allows action, adventure and suspense to come into play, as well as the aforementioned references to Tom Cruise, along with nods to film noir and early silent films (there are many sequences set on trains). There's even a “Rashomon”-esque flashback when we see Garfield's childhood abandonment from Vic's perspective, changing the way we understand how Garfield found himself alone in that alley that night. The heist may make up most of the story, but it is simply a means by which an estranged father and son can escape the emotional prison of masculinity and express their feelings to each other.

“The Garfield Movie,” directed by Mark Dindal and written by Paul A. Kaplan, Mark Torgove and David Reynolds, may have a deep understanding of film history to delight movie-loving parents, but it is still a movie for kids and It has the same quirky touch. , burdened energy that one might expect from a project of this type. The aesthetic is closer to the comic strip look than the CGI/live-action abomination of the two Garfield films from earlier in the aughts, which is in vogue with other animated films that adopt an illustrated style, albeit less avant-garde than some. recent examples (the “Spider-verse” films, “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem”).

Bill Murray voiced the rusty, rotund feline in “Garfield: The Movie” (2004) and “Garfield: A Tale of Two Kitties” (2006) in his own dry, laconic way, and Pratt does an excellent job taking on the vocal duties. Harvey Guillen provides the voice for Odie's noises, and the rest of the voice cast (Nicholas Hoult as Jon, Cecily Strong as a Midwestern security guard named Marge) round out his world.

Although the film is formulaic and somewhat annoyingly energetic, it is cute and irreverent enough, and manages to bridge the generation gap, offering a kid-friendly film that can keep adults somewhat entertained for the duration, proving that even after all These years, Garfield's still has it.

Katie Walsh is a film critic for the Tribune News Service.