Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties (2006)

Jennifer Love Hewitt
Breckin Meyer
Bill Murray
Lucy Davis
Billy Connolly

Directed by Tim Hill

With a plotline derivative of Mark Twain’s “The Prince and the Pauper”, this sequel to the original film knows exactly who saw the original and where their core audience lies, 5-10 year olds. The death of an English noblewoman and the subsequent willing of her entire estate to her cat (who is the spitting image of Garfield) leaves her nephew, Dargis (Billy Connoly), furious. Determined to take control of her estate, he hatches a plan to get rid of the cat. Meanwhile, Jon Arbuckle (Meyer) learns that the woman he loves, Liz (Hewitt), is leaving the country for a symposium in England. Jon decides to meet his ladylove in England and surprise her. Garfield and Odie hitch a ride to make sure Jon doesn’t make a complete fool out of himself, and in case you haven’t figured it out yet, through a comedy of errors, Garfield ends up being mistaken for the English cat, and has to stop Dargis’ plot before he is killed. All the while keeping track of his hapless owner.

This film makes prefect sense as a sequel. You have already made one film with Garfield, what could be better? Two Garfields. Give one an English accent and a barnyard full of talking friends and you are ready to go. You really don’t need an engaging plot, realistic dialogue or passable acting when you are trying to appeal to young children, at least that seemed to be the thinking of the producers of this film, because everything in the film except the animals seemed pretty inconsequential. Just show Garfield jumping into a few pans of lasagna and pushing Odie off the couch and you have a kid’s movie.

While the highlight of a mostly dismal film was certainly the big orange cat (having been a fan of Garfield as a child and not seeing the original film I did get a kick out of seeing him brought to life), whenever Garfield wasn’t on screen we were left with a film that really didn’t have much to offer at all and my thrill at seeing Garfield jump around could have just as easily been fulfilled with a 30 second clip of Garfield smarting off to Jon on Youtube.

I understand that this film wasn’t made for adults and isn’t expected to be on a lot of critics top ten lists of the year, but sitting in a theater full of children, I noticed something that speaks more to the film than I ever could. A little more than half way through the film, the children started shifting in their seats. Most of them seemed bored, and with the exception of a few one-liners chuckles, the theater was very quiet. The only thing I could take out of that was that maybe in an age of Pixar/Disney/Dreamworks films designed to please children and adults, it takes more than an orange cat jumping around with a few talking barnyard animals. To paraphrase an old TV commercial: “Give it to Mikey, he’ll eat anything.” Well, I don’t even think Mikey would eat this one.


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