When I was in the third grade, a friend of mine suddenly rose like a phoenix from the ashes to untold heights of popularity amongst our grade school peers when it was revealed that he could draw a perfect Garfield on anything – pencil cases, trapper keepers and binders proved to be the most popular items. Why do you need to know this? To keep in mind that at one point in the eighties, Garfield ruled the Earth. His popularity was so out of control that it would bestow upon a gangly third grader the ability to woo new friends and become a sort of cartooning super-stud simply by doodling a primitive looking comic strip cat.

Fast forward two decades (God, that makes me feel old) and Garfield is back – well, technically he never went away, he just became less popular over time. At any rate, he finally made the leap to a live action (sort of) film after twenty five years of panelized syndicated mayhem, a solid cartoon series (I don't care what anyone says, Garfield And Friends was good), and all manner of books, toys, and any other form of merchandise you can think of. The problem is that although Garfield has made a reappearance in the collective consciousness of our pop culture world once more, he forgot to bring the 'funny' with him this time out.

The plot of the film is simple enough. Garfield (a completely CGI rendered creation voiced by the one and only Bill Murray) lives alone with his owner, Jon (Breckin Meyer), a likeable loser with a good heart and not a whole lot of social grace. Garfield spends his days eating John's lasagna and stealing milk and the occasional pie from the neighbors, taking time out to periodically torment the local dogs and pick on another neighborhood cat named Nermal.

Garfield more or less has it made, and he knows it, until one day when Jon takes Garfield to the vet's office and leaves with a new dog that he takes home in an attempt to impress the cute little veterinarian who works there, Liz (Jennifer Love Hewitt). The dog, named Odie, proves to be a constant thorn in Garfield's side and when Odie starts getting more attention and affection from Jon and his friends than he gets, it's time for him to take action. One night he locks Odie out of the house, figuring that ought to put the dumb mutt in his place, but unfortunately Odie runs off and ends up with a wanna-be newscaster named Happy Chapman (Stephen Tobolowsky) who comes up with a completely retarded scheme to use Odie to break into broadcasting big time.

Eventually Garfield proves that he is not without a soul and he caves, opting to head on out of his beloved cul-de-sac and rescue Odie in hopes of saving him before it's too late and to redeem himself for his past transgressions. It's all very predictable, very drawn out, and not funny in the least.

First things first – while Garfield's character may prove he is not without a soul by having a change of heart and taking it upon himself to save the dog, the style in which he is animated does nothing to further that characteristic. The entire film is a live action endeavor save for Garfield himself, who is completely computer generated and as such, stands out like a really big sore thumb. The fact that the likeness isn't all that akin to the Garfield we know and love from Jim Davis' long running comic strip doesn't help matters much, and what we have here is some sort of mutant offspring of that original cat – it just doesn't work, and in all seriousness, it's kind of creepy.

If an eerie faux-cat isn't enough to turn you off, there's the humor – or severe lack thereof. None of the jokes in this movie are funny. They're definitely silly and they're definitely goofy, but they're not funny. As the film played out before my bleeding eyes, I wanted nothing more than to laugh. Garfield And Friends was able to make me laugh, and Davis' comic strip was able to make me laugh - Garfield: The Movie only made me cringe. The dialogue is predictable. The story is predictable. There's no suspense, no surprise, and no reason to care about anything that's happening.

With that being said, is Bill Murray's voice work able to salvage any of this mess? No, sadly it isn't, or at least not enough of it. Murray does do a good job of sounding bored for parts of the film, as Garfield should sound, but then when in a few completely out of character scenes the world's most famous cat kicks into action, he just doesn't seem to fit – neither do the scenes for that matter. Garfield is supposed to be fat, lazy, and sarcastic and while the sarcasm comes across well, the fat and lazy does not and as such, Garfield just doesn't seem like Garfield.

It's a sad reflection on the film when the supporting animal characters are more interesting than the lead. Garfield's mouse friend is the best part of the movie and he's only interesting for a couple of minutes. The rest of the film strays way too far away from the qualities that made the strips and the cartoons as funny as they were, and the end result is a generic, boring, and poorly written mess of movie that won't likely appeal to anyone over the age of four.

Video:

Fox gives you the option of checking out the film in either its original theatrical aspect ratio of 1.85.1 in a transfer that is enhanced for anamorphic sets, or in a pan and scan fullframe presentation that seriously compromises the compositions and makes a bad movie even worse. Overall, the image quality on this release is really quite good. The picture is sharp and detailed and the color reproduction is fantastic. Black levels stay strong and deep and there aren't any problems with mpeg compression artifacts. Edge enhancement and line shimmering is kept to a minimum and the picture is free of any print damage and exhibits only a minor amount of film grain in a few spots.