First Take: The Garfield Movie - love Mondays. Hate this film.

SYNOPSIS: After Garfield’s unexpected reunion with his long-lost father, ragged alley cat Vic, he and his canine friend Odie are forced from their perfectly pampered lives to join Vic on a risky heist.

It wouldn’t be a multifilm marathon without at least one film that belongs in the depths of hell - and boy did we have a real doozy this year to join the likes of The Queen’s Corgi (which was bad enough to get a Journal episode made about it). Somehow, inexplicably, Sony decided to take on a new Garfield film, made independently of the studio. One which has been in development since 2011. I was three cups of Earl Grey deep when venturing into this ‘minefield’… and I am so glad I’ve made it out in one piece. Thermonuclear rant incoming, so longtime fans of the blog will know what happens next: cue the music.

Mark Dindal of Chicken Little and The Emperor’s New Groove fame has broken free from Disney to direct this and… oooooof. This is a mess. 1 hour 41 minutes of poorly paced, dumb, stupid, poorly executed animation that serves no purpose other than to get kids into cinemas. I am not angry, just very very very very very disappointed. Script wise, it is three credited writers (and likely more ghostwriters) - Paul A. Kaplan, Mark Torgove, and David Reynolds are the fall guys for this trainwreck of a script that has barely any legible plot, a story that goes all over the place, dialogue that is too on the nose ('I do my own stunts… like Tom Cruise’), and to wrap it all up with a cherry on top, the product placement is worse than the Tom and Jerry film I willingly sat through a few years ago - no, it’s worse than Haunted Mansion last year - which explains how this got a cinema release. As for the score, John Debney what were you thinking by besmurching Lorne Balfe’s arrangement of the Mission Impossible theme and Hans Zimmer’s version of the Top Gun theme for the sake of a punchlime? Technically this is an absolute shambles all over the shop.

Then there’s the cast. I have no clue how or why Chris Pratt, Samuel L Jackson, Hannah Waddingham, Ving Rhames and Nicholas Hoult took the contract to make this, as the voice acting is soulless, lacks ANY emotion, feels very phoned in, and believe me this says a lot when even SNOOP DOGG has a character in it! Reading up on when the castings were all confirmed, this definitely feels like a film hit hard by the SAG strike (all very rushed to finish recording) but I have to ask Sony - make it make sense. Apparently there is a videogame and a sequel in active development with Alcon Entertainment, which is mental considering it’s a 36% on Rotten Tomatoes, and still grossing over $250million at the box office. This is a film that arguably completes a full collection of mediocrity across the 11 years I’ve done this - just when I thought The Emoji Movie and Nine Lives were the benchmark of terrible movies… this one comes and blows both of them out of the water.

THE VERDICT POST MORTEM

Lord almighty that was bad. An incoherent plot, voice acting with no emotion, a flat, emotionless script, the abomination of some fantastic licensed music… everyone involved should hang their heads in shame. There’s bad films, then, there’s this. I legitimately felt like being mummified after watching it.

RATING: Minus 5/5