I wish I could go back to before I watched Garfield: the Movie (2004). Do not get my intentions misconstrued: I do not wish for you to watch this movie. It’s terrible. It has become the bane of my existence. I can’t stop thinking about how bad it is. 

I am also refusing to watch any portion of this movie again, but its contents were seared thoroughly into my mind. 

This may have been one of the absolute worst movies I’ve ever seen in my life. There was not a single piece of valuable creative material within its excruciating 80 minute runtime. The storyline roughly follows Garfield and his owner Jon as Jon gets a new dog to impress local veterinarian Liz. Then, an evil television producer kidnaps Odie to make money off him and Garfield goes to try to save him. The plot really doesn’t make any sense and if you think about it for like 5 minutes the intellectual foundation completely falls apart. 

One of my least favorite parts of the movie is that Garfield is the only animated character. All of the other animals (including some other cats) are live action with animated mouth movements. Watching Garfield’s poorly 3D animated body slinking around reminds me of a nightmare I had once about my dead cat coming back to life. It’s really jarring to get over the appearance of Garfield, and I think he might be in about 95% of the movie.

Bill Murray is the voice of Garfield in this movie. I wondered, as you did, why Bill Murray would be in a movie where he had to meow extensively. It turns out, it’s because he was tricked into it. The writer of the Garfield movie is named Joel Cohen, which is very similar to director Joel Coen. The latter is an Oscar award winning director of movies like No Country for Old Men, Fargo, and the Big Lebowski. Bill Murray thought that Joel Cohen was Joel Coen. Joel Cohen has not been nominated for any Oscars, but has directed such acclaimed films as Daddy Day Camp, Gnomes and Trolls, Sister Sister, and Garfield 2: a Tale of Two Kitties. 

The plot of Garfield is maybe the worst out of any movie I’ve ever seen. I cannot believe that someone read the script and approved it. Garfield goes from hating Odie so much that he kicks him out of the house causing him to get kidnapped to deciding that they’re best friends and that he has to go and save him. The part that made me the most mad was when Garfield fell out of a skyscraper and fell to the ground. I was really hoping that Garfield was going to die and then the movie would be over, but alas, he survived by falling into a lasagna truck. There’s no way any self respecting adult can think about creative decisions like this and say that they were a solid move. There’s this other scene where Garfield is confronted with an army of rats and they all leave him alone because Garfield owes another rat a favor. 

The real problem with Garfield lies in the fact that it’s a calculatedly inoffensive corporate output. There’s not meant to be any real artistic value in the Garfield movie. The studio just wanted to make a quick buck off of a popular brand name. It’s so obvious that someone had one idea for a 20 minute episode of some Disney channel show and Joel Cohen got his hands on it and stretched it out to 80 pages.

This is the worst movie ever. Do not watch it. It’s borderline unwatchable.