Close

Blu-ray Review: THE GARFIELD MOVIE

Home » Blu-ray Review: THE GARFIELD MOVIE

Sep 01 Posted by in DVD/Blu-ray, Reviews | Comments

The Garfield Movie takes everyone’s lasagna and pizza-loving, Monday-hating orange tabby on an all new feature-length adventure. The film opens with Garfield (Chris Pratt) as a kitten, living in the alley with his father, Vic (Samuel L. Jackson). One day Vic goes out to get them food and never returns, so Garfield follows his nose to an Italian restaurant, where he meets the lonely Jon (Nicholas Hoult), who takes pity on the hungry kitten, feeds him, and adopts him (though according to Garfield, it was him who adopted Jon). For the next five years Garfield lives a lazy, pampered life of luxury, watching TV and eating food all day, and hanging out with his best buddy, Jon’s adopted dog Odie (Harvey Guillén). However, this calm, peaceful and seemingly-perfect life is about to collapse.

Two dogs suddenly arrive at Jon’s home and abduct Garfield and Odie, taking them to an abandoned mall. Massive shar pei Roland (Brett Goldstein, Ted Lasso) and scrappy whippet Nolan (Bowen Yang, SNL) work for Persian cat Jinx (Hannah Waddingham, Ted Lasso, The Fall Guy). Garfield’s father had been part of her crew, but a heist gone wrong resulted in Jinx getting locked up for several years. Now that she’s out, she wants restitution and revenge. She had Garfield kidnapped in order to lure Vic out of hiding, and it worked. Garfield gets an unexpected reunion after 5 years, and is forced to join forces with his estranged father to heist a milk truck from a nearby dairy. However, they soon discover that the job isn’t going to be as easy as they thought. The dairy has heightened security, led by a determined guard named Marge Malone (Cecily Strong). They seek the help of the dairy’s former mascot, a wise bull named Otto (Ving Rhames), who reluctantly agrees to assist them in exchange for helping to free his love Ellie, who’s locked inside. Though Vic and Garfield are unaware that Marge has plans to make sure they fail, in order to get her revenge on Vic.



The Garfield Movie is a fun new take on this classic comics character. The film keeps all those eccentricities we know and love about this cat, but also explores more of his backstory and expands his world. Garfield is the real boss in Jon’s house, always getting his way, and taking advantage of a very loving and naïve Jon. The film modernizes things, bringing Garfield into a beautiful 3D-animated world, while still feeling like the same classic comic character, but also introduces some modern creature comforts and technology. This is the ideal era for a lazy cat like Garfield, who takes full advantage of things like streaming services, and food delivery apps with drone service. Using a mobile phone, anything he wants is right at his fingertips. But soon Garfield finds himself in the outside world, on an action-packed adventure into the unknown.

While Garfield often breaks the fourth wall and speaks directly to the viewer about his thoughts, his pal Odie just barks and whines. I grew up watching Garfield cartoons in the 1980s, so I was a little worried about Chris Pratt (who’s already voiced so many other iconic characters) taking ver the voice, but he does a wonderful job, capturing the orange tabby’s signature attitude and humor.

The film introduces this new character of Vic that we’ve never seen before, and it allows the movie to explore this really fun new dynamic. We’ve only seen Jon as the father-like figure in Garfield’s life, but now we have Vic, who Garfield believes abandoned him as a kitten. While Garfield doesn’t trust Vic and doesn’t want anything todo with him, they are forced to work together to carry out this heist. And this forces them to confront feelings and their relationship. Samuel L. Jackson is perfect in this role, and has great chemistry with Pratt. In fact, the whole main voice cast is wonderful—Cecily Strong and Hannah Waddingham are deliciously evil, Brett Goldstein and Bowen Yang make a hilarious duo of bumbling minions, Ving Rhames feels so natural as the wise old bull, and there are so many other talented folks making cameos, including Snoop Dogg, Janelle James, Angus Cloud, Jeff Foxworthy and more.

Overall, the film has a great mix of humor and heart. There’s also a surprising amount of action, which isn’t what I usually associate with a lazy cat like Garfield. One particular highlight of the film is a sequence that takes place on a moving train. The film kept my interest from start to finish, and I think I enjoyed it even more the second time around.

Sony has released The Garfield Movie on physical media on Blu-ray and DVD, but it is also available digitally in 4K. I was sent the Blu-ray release for review, which looks and sounds fantastic. I had originally seen this film in the theater in 3D, but unfortunately, Sony stopped releasing its movies in any home 3D format years ago. However, the picture quality of the Blu-ray looks nearly flawless, with a pristine picture, beautiful bright colors, and an excellent level of detail. I can’t really imagine it looking any better. The audio track provides clear dialogue throughout, and makes excellent use of the stereo and surround sound to provide a highly-immersive experience. This is noticeable right from the opening as Garfield is in an alley, with the scary sounds of thunder, traffic, and the noises of the city all around. The film also has a catchy pop soundtrack—Jon Batiste’s “Good Life”, which plays several times during the movie will no doubt get stuck in your head!

The Blu-ray release comes with both a Blu-ray and a DVD disc, which reside on either side of a standard HD keepcase, covered by a glossy slipcover. slipcover. It also includes redemption instructions for an HD digital copy. The disc contains over 35 minutes of bonus material, including some behind-the-scenes featurettes with the cast/crew, a gag reel, a deleted Jinx musical number scene, some how-to-draw featurettes, and more.


What’s Included:

Film: (1:41:00)

Tags:
, , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Available for Amazon Prime