Film Reviews

Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties

• Rating:
• Director: Tim Hill.
• Starring: Breckin Meyer, Billy Connolly, Jennifer Love Hewitt, Bill Murray.
• Details: US, 80mins, G.

Mark Twain's The Prince And The Pauper gets the old makeover with the second instalment of the lasagne loving cat's madcap adventures. This time Garfield (voiced by Bill Murray), finds himself in London where the put-upon Jon Arbuckle (Meyer) follows the lovely Liz (Love Hewitt) to ask her to marry him. Meanwhile, when an old lady's vast estate is left to her beloved cat Prince (voiced by Tim Curry), who is Garfield's doppelganger, her scheming nephew Dargis (Connolly) plans to do the cat in and take the estate for himself. In a mix-up, Garfield and Prince are switched and while Garfield is content to live out the high life, Prince finds life with John's idiot dog Odie tiresome. An improvement on the original but Garfield's witty quips and odd observations on life still can't find their way into the script in this dull family adventure. To hold adult's attention, it might have been a good idea to let Murray write his own lines and not have Cheaper By The Dozen writers Joel Cohen and Alex Sokolow, who have seemed to indulge in method writing by scribing a script as lazy as their subject, to spin out clanger after clanger. A talking cat will always give the toddlers a laugh but judging by the ones that attended the screening, the novelty wears thin pretty soon. Where Babe worked by having live animals voiced by celebrities, Garfield mixes CGI with live farm animals (voiced by Bob Hoskins and Sharon Osbourne among others) and both look out of place when put next to each other. With bad reviews as rife for this Garfield as the last one, it means there will be only five or so more sequels to drudge through before the franchise will collapse and that in itself is a relief.

Review by Gavin Burke