David Ziffer

My wife, 11-year-old grandson, and I were the only people in the theater when the flick began, and somehow by the end there were just two more. There's a good reason for that. The trailer is, in my opinion, deliberately deceptive. It conveys the idea that the movie will be filled with the same kind of domestic struggles (among Garfield, Odie, and their owner Jon) that dominate the comic strip. I find such struggles pretty funny and was expecting the movie to entertain both us and our grandson. But the trailer is just a lure to sucker elders into taking their kids. The stuff in the trailer was the ONLY funny stuff in the movie, and that constituted maybe the first ten minutes. Shortly after the tale of how Garfield came to "adopt" Jon ends, the movie suddenly turns to a ridiculous plot in which Garfield's father (who had abandoned him in the alley at the movie start) comes back into Garfield's life to pull both Garfield and Odie out of the house and into a preposterous adventure in which Garfield & Odie get entangled with criminal elements from Garfield's dad's past. I found it utterly uninteresting, to the point where I eventually pulled out my phone, something I would not have done had there been any people around us. But our grandson found the show entertaining, or at least he said he did. So it seems Garfield's producers have figured out two things: 1) how to entertain an 11-year-old at the expense of everyone else and 2) how to produce a misleading trailer that has nothing to do with the vast majority of the movie, but which lures naïve adults into taking their kids to see it. The purpose of the movie, I believe, is to introduce at least six entirely new characters into the Garfield stuffed-toy franchise. My guess is that they're already on the shelves.