The Garfield Movie: Chris Pratt is no grumpy cat

Unlike lasagna, Garfield the cat lacks layers. He loves Italian food, hates Mondays and is neutral toward his owner, Jon, and canine sidekick, Odie. This simplicity has sustained Garfield’s 46-year career as the world’s most widely syndicated comic strip, plus a side hustle that’s slapped his striped rump on coffee cups, car windshields, slippers, sofas, lava lamps, fish tanks, landline phones and, now, his third theatrical feature, “The Garfield Movie,” which takes the simplest of ingredients and somehow gets every one wrong.

To be fair, it’s hard to build an entire movie around a character who doesn’t want to move or change. (The Emmy Award-winning 1989 TV special “Garfield’s Babes and Bullets” got around the cat’s inertia by having him nap underneath a trench coat and dream of being a detective named Sam Spayed.) But this film’s director, Mark Dindal, is known for mutating properties into something else, like his beloved 2000 comedy “The Emperor’s New Groove,” which was once seen as the death of the prestigious ’90s Disney renaissance but has now been embraced by audiences who accept that it races about with the rude energy of the Looney Tunes.

Still, it just feels wrong that Dindal here reworks Garfield into a tragic hero equal parts Arthur Miller and Tom Cruise — an abandoned kitten with daddy issues who’s willing to backflip off a speeding train. Made for an audience mostly too young to have held the funny pages of a newspaper, it’s a madcap heist flick that feels like someone grabbed a random screenplay and scrawled “Garfield” at the top.

The script by Paul A. Kaplan, Mark Torgove and David Reynolds leaves Jon (Nicholas Hoult) behind as Garfield, his estranged dad (Samuel L. Jackson) and Odie (Harvey Guillén) team up with a lovelorn bull (Ving Rhames) to steal a milk truck from a dairy farm. We’re also given a villainous Persian named Jinx (Hannah Waddingham) and references to “Top Gun,” “Mission: Impossible,” “Fargo” and “Reservoir Dogs.” This caper asks us to believe that Garfield, the figurehead of selfishness, is invested in getting two cows to canoodle to Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On.” The cat’s misanthropy has been swapped out for big emotions and bigger stunts, plus scenes where Garfield cries in public and cuddles to swooning violins. It’s, well, cheesy.

Some images feel right, say when Garfield is backlit by hearts and laser beams and looks exactly as he did on my middle school math folder. Other sequences boast imagination: a dash through a cheese factory, a lovely watercolor-style flashback to a bovine romance. I giggled whenever a giant Shar-Pei (Brett Goldstein) enfolded objects in his wrinkles like a child’s finger trap puzzle.

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But I recoiled as soon as Garfield began to talk.

Jim Davis, the cat’s creator, never allowed the animal’s mouth to move, a rule that held for decades until the cat leaped to the big screen. Here, bizarrely, the animators have decided that Garfield’s pale muzzle should waggle like a lecherous, old-timey mustache. Worse, when he speaks, we hear not sardonic contempt, but the earnest cheer of Chris Pratt, the goofball of “Guardians of the Galaxy” and “Jurassic World,” who just last year was pelted with tomatoes for the “It’s-a me!” accent he gave to the titular Italian plumber in the “The Super Mario Bros. Movie.”

No one is pretending that Garfield is a dramatic achievement on par with Hamlet. Nevertheless, the last movie star who voiced him was Bill Murray — hereby deemed the Laurence Olivier of cartoon cats — who has claimed he believed the film would be directed by one of the Coen brothers. Murray’s Garfield made sense. He’s Hollywood’s version of a disdainful feline, a celebrity who legendarily can be reached only at a phone he never answers. But Pratt, who went viral for admitting he doesn’t even like lasagna, is a go-getter famous for losing 60 pounds to rebrand himself as an action lead. Frankly, Pratt has dog energy — a willingness to be a good boy for any franchise. I suspect he even enjoys Mondays.

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You might be thinking: Hey, it’s just a Garfield cartoon, stop throwing a hissy fit. But it’s astounding what a hash it makes of the very, very few things Garfield stands for. It’s a Garfield film whose plot takes place from a Thursday to a Sunday, a film where the cat is continually shown up by competent canines, where the main celebrity cameo is a one-eyed cat played by Snoop Dogg. The fat cat’s cynicism isn’t on the screen but behind it. Leaving the theater, the bad taste in my mouth came from the studio shoving it down my own throat that it believes audiences will, like this Garfield, swallow anything.

PG. At area theaters. Contains action/peril and mild thematic elements. 111 minutes.

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