‘I apologize in advance.’

Since his first print debut in 1976, Garfield has had 3 feature films. Two of them were not particularly good, but at least they featured Bill Murray as Garfield and therefore accurately captured the jaded ennui of the beloved ginger cat. This film is not very good – in fact it is very, very bad – and stars Chris Pratt as Garfield. He is woefully miscast in the role, essentially playing a variant of himself – a Pratt in cat’s clothing. After last year’s The Super Mario Bros. Movie, it’s hard not to wonder how and why he keeps being given these roles. It’s not the case that he’s ill-suited to animation, The Lego Movie films more than prove that he’s got the chops and voice for it. Simply put,. he is not Garfield. As Andy Dwyer in Parks & Recreation, he came to sort of close-ish to it. But just because he talks about hating Mondays (because bad things happen to him on Mondays – a hugely inaccurate interpretation of Garfield mythology) and eats lots of food, that does not make Garfield. There’s a lot of dog energy about Pratt’s take on the role, pitching Garfield as lazy rather than existentially weary.

It’s not helped by the fact the entire plot of the film is so far removed from a Garfield story that it makes the whole enterprise feel like an IP swindle to get bums on seats. The story is a crime caper, with Garfield barely in the house with minimal interactions with Jon (Nicholas Hoult) and with Odie (a huge waste of Harvey Guillén) simply in reacting sidekick mode. Instead the focus is on Garfield’s dynamics with his father, Vic (Samuel L. Jackson – who spends the entire film seemingly try to hide the fact it’s Samuel L. Jackson with some *interesting* vocal choices). Garfield breaks the fourth wall to give us a prologue, his back story of how he was abandoned by his father and adopted by Jon. There is so much product placement within this single sequence alone that it is unseemly.

Unsurprisingly, Vic returns to Garfield’s life several years later, when our story ‘starts’ (if, it ever does in fact ‘start’). Their reunion is triggered by some incredibly contrived and convoluted scheming by antagonist Jinx (Hannah Waddingham – I’m not angry about the poor quality of the material she’s given her, just disappointed) involving stealing lots of milk. Somehow a Bull called Otto (Ving Rhames) gets involved because he wants to be reunited with his beloved. Garfield must work through his trauma and with his father to save the day, on hand to deliver the dry and pithy comments we would expect from him.

Except the dialogue has no pith, or wit, or warmth and the only reason it could be described as dry is because it is so lacking at evoking a single spark of joy or laughter. Tumbleweeds could have rolled through the cinema screen, such was the shortage of laughs at the multimedia family screening. Never have so few laughs been emitted at a multimedia family screening, thus inadvertently disproving the myth that kids will find anything funny.

The film also makes the fatal flaw of trying to be funny and knowing to adults by making those aggravating kind of jokes that are designed to go over kids heads – which is both patronising to adults and condescending to younger audience members. There’s jokes about fast food delivery apps, dating apps, hipsters, phonelines and anxiety – none of these land. The moment that really epitomised how tonally wrong and poorly conceived the entire film had been was a reunion and implied love scene soundtracked by Marvin Gaye’s ‘Let’s Get It On’. Words cannot define how baffling and ill-judged this sequence is, raising three key questions – ‘Who is this film for?’, ‘What on Earth has it got to do with Garfield?’ and ‘How can 101 minutes feel like 3 hours?!?’

A total misfire that’s even worse than you might think.

[1/5 stars]

The Garfield Movie is in UK cinemas from Friday 24th May.