Film Review: Garfield's newest movie is hardly a cinematic lasagne

A still from the Garfield movie

• Garfield: The Movie
• ★★★☆☆
• Cinema release

A third feature-length movie to feature the pizza-chomping cat, the animated Garfield the Movie (G) opens with an impossibly cute kitten Garfield (voiced by Chris Pratt) being abandoned in a dark alleyway by his father, Vic (Samuel L Jackson). 

Happily, Garfield adopts Jon (Nicholas Hoult), trains him to behave as a good human should, and then — just when everything is coming up Garfield — he finds himself involved in a heist on Lactose Farms because the no-good Vic has run afoul of the feline femme fatale Jinx (Hannah Waddingham).

Narrated in a laconic drawl by Chris Pratt, this shaggy dog-cat story is charmingly irreverent, with Garfield frequently mugging to camera as the increasingly implausible tale plays out.

Dedicated fans of Jim Davis’s comic strip will probably love it; otherwise, it all depends on where you stand vis-à-vis the comic potential of an egregiously self-entitled cat.