The Garfield Movie

The CGI animation is impressive and expressive, but the storytelling is generic kiddie fare hijinks that could've featured any ol' cat.

You’ll be forgiven for forgetting the previous screen versions of Jim Davis’ “Garfield” comic strip, though there have been many: three different TV shows plus a baker’s dozen of television specials. And, of course, 2004’s lackluster “Garfield: The Movie” and its even more unmemorable sequel.

Bill Murray famously dissed his role voicing the gluttonous tabby cat, even calling it his one regret in life in “Zombieland.”

I guess Hollywood figures enough time has passed for those movies to recede into the collective unconscious, so here’s another go with “The Garfield Movie,” a fully CGI animated attempt with Chris Pratt voicing Garfield. That’s already teed off a lot of people, same as it did when Pratt was announced as the voice of Mario. I mean, is it his fault people want to pay him big bucks to sit in an audio booth for three or four days vocally pretending to be a cat?

Pratt does just fine, though his version is much more upbeat and spritely than Murray’s can’t-be-bothered readings.

This “Garfield” starts off OK, setting the scene for the tubby kitty’s life: he lives with his owner, Jon (Nicholas Hoult), a pathetic single man living in a modest house in the suburbs. Garfield’s co-pet, though really more of a lickspittle, is Odie the dog, dim-witted and servile.

While Garfield can talk, humans can’t hear him, though he and Jon seem to be able to understand each other well enough. He can even work the TV remote and order food online for delivery. Odie only makes dog noises, supplied by Harvey Guillén.

The screenplay by Paul A. Kaplan, Mark Torgove and David Reynolds even supply an origin story for Garfield. He gets abandoned as a kitten by a mysterious figure, wanders over to an Italian restaurant where Jon is having dinner, and the two bond over their shared love of deep-dish lasagna and double-pepperoni pizza.

(Odie’s genesis is left a mystery.)

Within the long mythology of the Garfield strip, the movie eschews the more modern portion where Jon has at least found a semblance of a life and an ongoing courtship with Garfield’s veterinarian, Liz, who’s seen briefly as a background character. I was sort of hoping the film would map out this big change in their lives and take it a little further down the road.

Instead, Jon and the domestic scene is soon ditched altogether for a spate of typical animated animal hijinks. There are several villainous figures and a whole complicated heist movie plot, entailing the usual “putting together a team” section and then the expected foul-ups, surprises and changes of heart.

This chiefly involves Victor, a mammoth older cat who is soon revealed to be Garfield’s dad, voiced by Samuel L. Jackson. They spend most of the movie working out their relationships issues, interspersed with all the contretemps of “the job.”

Hannah Waddingham plays the Persian cat Jinx, the main baddie of the piece, who has a longstanding gripe with Vic and therefore his kid, too. Brett Goldstein and Brett Goldstein do the voices of her henchdogs, Roland and Nolan. Cecily Stong is Marge, who takes her duties as an animal control officer quite zealously.

Things get really strange when Garfield and his ersatz crew are tasked with breaking into a massive corporate dairy farm operation to rescue a milking cow at the behest of Otto (Ving Rhames), her romantic partner who has been banished from the place. Otto is part chief planner and part zen master, milking his pregnant pauses.

The CGI animation is impressive and expressive, with bright vivid colors and strong details. The feel is deliberately in the cartoon-y zone, trying to emulate the look of the comic strip but make it pop off the screen. That it does. There are big set-pieces inside the dairy factory with all sorts of Rube Goldberg-esque machinery, a big train chase and a couple other nifty scenes.

At some point during all these antics, what I realized is they have nothing to do with Garfield. You could’ve taken any cartoon cat and put him through these same paces with equal effect. Director Mark Dindal and the rest of the creative team were focused on making a big, boingy animated adventure, not trying to capture the heart of a comic about a lazy cat who hates Mondays and gorges on pizza.

“The Garfield Movie” is geared completely toward small kids, without even a few grace notes of ironic humor or in-jokes to keep older children interested — God forbid adults. The whole premise feels like it sprang from an A.I. query than people who wanted to capture the essence of a comic, the thing that made it stick around for 36 years.

Garfield is a cat who doesn’t try very hard, so I guess in that sense they succeeded.