| Written by John Shea,
on 23-06-2004 05:40
|
Published in : Reviews, Movies |
Have you ever you ever discovered that someone around you had lice or a tick or even fleas? At that point you start to develop an almost overwhelming urge to start scratching yourself, just from the thought of those pests running loose. Well that relentless itching pretty well describes my experience sitting through Garfield.
The movie is based on the long running comic strip. I admit once being a fan of the strip but I gave up reading it years ago. I can only take recycled jokes for so long. Creator Jim Davis obviously ran out of good ideas a long time ago and is milking this thing for all it's worth before the well goes dry. But even if I was still a fan, I'd question the logic of turning a three panel comic strip into a feature length movie. The difficulty in stretching the material shows with a running time less than 90 minutes. In movies, a good movie can never be too long. Conversely a bad movie is always too long. Garfield is way too long.
Let's talk about the design of the fat cat star. It is an intensely uncomfortable creation that seems to be trying to make too many people happy and ends up pleasing no one. The body is more or less that of a real cat, just made much fatter than any cat I've ever come across. The fur is actually very well animated. This is clearly where the hard work went into the computer animation. The head is where things get ugly. The design is a very unhappy compromise between a line drawing cartoon and a real cat. The look needed desperately to tilt in one direction or the other. The worst part is the eyes. Garfield is given human eyes rather than cat eyes and at their best they look plasticky and fake. The overall effect is one of great distraction. Even though the computer animation is well handled, the design is so awful that it becomes impossible to take this creation seriously. The animators might as well have put bolts in his neck and screeched "It's alive!"
The human actors in this film have the thankless task of being less realistic than a talking computer animated cat. Breckin Meyer plays Jon, Garfield's owner and Jennifer Love Hewitt plays Liz, Garfield's vet. If these two had been replaced with actual cardboard cutouts of the actors, it wouldn't have affected my opinion of this movie in the slightest. They are dull trivial characters without an ounce of personality or reason. The only thing worse is the film's villain, Happy Chapman (Stephen Tobolowsky), a guy so phony that replacing him with a cardboard cutout would have been an improvement. I hate saying that because I really like Tobolowsky as a character actor. This is just a wretched role that no one could have made work.
The plot, for lack of a better word, is about Jon bringing home the dog Odie from the vet, because Jon is desperately in love with Liz and will do anything to impress her. Garfield is appalled and eventually locks the dog out at night, causing Odie to run away where he can be captured by Happy Chapman, who needs a talented dog to get a job on some talk show. The comic strip was about Garfield's immense ego, laziness and love for eating. That stuff gets largely shoved aside to push a ridiculous story and have Garfield do things totally against his personality and physicallity, such as running all over the city and managing X-Games level skateboard tricks. Yeah, right. That works. There is about a ten second clip of Garfield stuffing his face with snacks late in the movie. If they had stretched that scene to feature length, I'd think better of this film. They take a fat lazy character and make him do aggressive athletic things for no apparent reason.
Finally, let's tackle the Bill Murray issue. Murray is one of the funniest and most consistent performers in movies. Here he provides the voice of Garfield. Murray is actually an excellent choice for the role and he gives it his all. He actually manages to create a few minor laughs with material that is ruthlessly unfunny. I won't fault him for his performance here. I will fault him for not running screaming away from the offer to do this picture. He is much to smart to have opted to make this turkey and it's going to sit on his resume about as comfortably as four trays of frozen lasagna would sit on your stomach.
I just can't say enough bad things about this movie. It's been awhile since I have felt actual physical discomfort at having to sit through a movie. It made me think fondly of such movies as Coyote Ugly, Timeline, Driven and yes, even Spice World. Now if you will excuse me I'm going to pull out about a dozen of my favorite movies on DVD to watch and cleanse myself of this experience.
- John Shea
Related Items:
|
