(SPOILERS ALERT 🚨)The Garfield Movie, released in theaters on May 24th in Canada and the U.S., was one I was highly looking forward to watching. I just couldn’t wait to see what would become of Garfield in this new movie, especially considering the last two live-action films were, YIKES to say the least.

At the start of the year, lots and lots of movie trailers and teasers started spewing out, Inside Out 2, Despicable Me 4, and so many other animated films, but one really caught my eye… Garfield. Garfield from this point hadn’t had any form of new media from 2016, and it really did not end on a high note with The Garfield Show.

I saw lots of rumors on YouTube and other social media saying there’d be a new Garfield movie. People guessed it might be live-action or 3D animated. And guess what? In that same month, we got the 3D animated film! THE ORANGE CAT MADE A RETURN.

From the trailer, it looked absolutely stunning, from the animation, the effects, and the actors they chose to play the characters… EXCEPT GARFIELD. The producers chose the absolute worst person to play Garfield, CHRIS PRATT. Yeah, you heard that right, Mr. Mario came back to voice our favorite Heathcliff clone, and he did absolutely terribly. From the trailers, people were dogging him and in my opinion…HE KIND OF DESERVED IT! I get it, they want all of these famous people to voice the characters but why Chris Pratt? He didn’t even try to change his voice AT ALL. Even in spite of this poor selection for the voice of Garfield, people were still very excited to watch the funny cat in theatre.

When it was finally released, I asked Sami to take me to the theater to watch it. I was very VERY excited to watch this movie and I didn’t want to miss watching it in theaters rather than waiting to stream it…so over the course of a few days, I kept asking her until she finally took me to go see it in theaters. I sat down, watched some trailers for other movies, and then BAM! Garfield & John popped onto the screen and it started out pretty alright (besides hearing Chris Pratt’s voice) but then when Garfield got kidnapped and all of these new characters just randomly appeared it started to go downhill. Most of the stuff that was in this movie had absolutely no relation to any older Garfield media and they just changed Garfield’s entire backstory for this movie, I thought the old one was pretty good as it was.

The script of the movie was also kind of terrible, with unfunny jokes and overall just bad humor. Garfield used to be funny, but now it just kind of seems like a cash grab, with Jim Davis, the original creator of Garfield not even being present in the production of the movie aside from only his approval of the movie’s creation.

If I had to give this movie a rating, I’d rate it 4.5/10… I know you think that’s a pretty harsh rating but this movie was truly just an okay movie. It had pretty good animation but it just missed the mark overall for me. I would rate the original 2 live-action Garfield movies much higher than this because at the very least, they were funny and employed A GOOD VOICE ACTOR FOR GARFIELD!

Garfield has changed a lot since 1978, and I’m very aware that doing the same stuff can get repetitive pretty quickly, but sometimes doing the same stuff is good…it really just seems like to me that Garfield will never be the same considering where it’s headed. However, one day I hope to see some new GOOD Garfield media.