Marshall and the Movies

PREFACE: I mentioned back in Random Factoid #42 that I had gone through a stint of reviewing movies when I was 13. After rummaging through my old home computer, I managed to find some of these reviews. In a special five day mini-series, I will reveal these reviews in their unadulterated form. I leave it up to you to comment, see how my style has changed (or maybe hasn’t). The final movie reviewed in the series is “Garfield: A Tale of Two Kitties,” a kids movie with the guts to invoke Dickens in its title.

You can tell when movie companies are just trying to prime people for their money by making a crappy sequel to a semi-popular series, most often in kid’s movies because people go in flocks and not alone.  Jim Davis ought to be ashamed of Tim Hill and 20^th Century Fox for ruining his loveably, lazy cartoon.  Garfield is a cat who cares about two things…food and himself.  In the first installment, it took him practically the whole movie to come around and care about Odie.  Meanwhile, in Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties, the tile is about the most creative thing the movie has to offer.  The plot is incredibly predictable (but then again, what kids movie isn’t), and not to mention carelessly written.  Garfield’s owner Jon leaves he and Odie in an animal kennel while he hunts down his girlfriend to pop the question.  Of course, Garfield and Odie escape and stowaway in the luggage.  This left me to think that how could security not see or hear them.  If they wanted an exciting plot twist, they should have had them detained and somehow run to catch the plane.  Meanwhile, a pampered cat that looks remarkably like Garfield inherits an enormous castle while the human heir is left furious.  Well, do you think that he’s going to go after the cat?  The estate provides no protection and just assumes that a power-hungry man will just leave the cat alone.  The rest of the movie is just a mess as the two cats swap worlds, and there are more pathetic attempts to get rid of the cat inheriting the castle.  The animals’ talking doesn’t match their mouths, and the whole thing comes of the same way…sloppy.  Any adult taking their child will yearn for the time back when Bill Murray was young and creating comic masterpieces on SNL.  There was no comic spark for Murray that could have saved this movie.  You may end up begging the kids to leave this to walk into Cars, because this is pure kitty litter.