The Unseen Movie Review

Garfield

The first rule of making a movie based around an existing character from another medium is: know your audience. When it was decided to adapt Ian Fleming’s James Bond books in the early 1960s, it was evident that young men would be the main group interested. When they started the Scooby Doo franchise a couple of years back, it was targeted solidly at the kids. Although both Bond and Scooby had potential to interest cinemagoers from outside the core group, they were not made with that intention, so avoided appearing undecided. It is rare that a Harry Potter or a Lord of the Rings comes along which can appeal to a broad audience from both sexes and all age groups.

So what is Garfield’s target audience? Back when the comic strip the film is based on was actually read by anyone, both children and adults seemed to enjoy the sarcastic quips of the fat ginger cat. But that was fifteen years ago. At least. Now it’s hard to see why they bothered. From being the world’s favourite cartoon strip during the 1980s, Garfield has faded into obscurity. The children the film seems to be aimed at are unlikely to have any idea who the central kitty is and their parents will soon remember why they stopped caring.

Then there’s the added problem that the Garfield strips were only ever three panels long, and only ever featured one joke: Garfield was quite intelligent but very, very lazy. The fat cat hero of the piece never actually did anything, and that was the whole point. As much as this may work in a short comic strip, translating a one-joke, one-note character into the centrepiece of a feature-length film is somewhat more tricky.

To give the filmmakers credit they have at least forked out for the only actor capable of voicing the lasagne-loving laconic lard-ass – the wonderful Bill Murray. When Garfield was turned into an animated kids’ TV series in the late 1980s, the chubby cat was voiced by the fabulously named Lorenzo Music, best known for his turn impersonating Murray while playing his character from Ghostbusters in that classic movie’s animated spin-off. For the live-action Garfield they’ve got the man himself.

Unfortunately Murray appears to have been on autopilot for this one, and the supporting cast are equally uninspired. Jennifer Love-Hewitt seems included purely to appeal to any men in the audience. The human lead, Garfield’s long-suffering owner Jon (Breckin Mayer), is so dull as to easily explain why Garfield spends most of his time bored witless. The contrived plot simply provides episodic set-ups for fairly uninspired gags taken straight out of the comic strip.

Cats are meant to have nine lives. Garfield’s first was as a comic strip, his second as an animated cartoon, his third as a car decoration. In his fourth incarnation as the centrepiece of an attempt to capture the family filmgoing market, the flabby feline has disproved that other myth about cats – they don’t always land on their feet. Sometimes, as here, they fall far short of their capabilities, and end up embarrassing everyone unfortunate enough to be watching.

posted by Nosemonkey @ 12:00 AM