Despite the fact I have always been a fan of old cartoon shorts, I can’t say that Tom & Jerry were ever personal favorites. I wasn’t sure why at first, but I think initially it had something to do with the fact that the cat and I shared a name and he always got the worse end of it. Later on, I came to a different conclusion: the cartoons didn’t follow the “rules” I liked about Bugs Bunny. Bugs, though a formidable foe, does not mess with anyone who doesn’t mess with him first. Leave Bugs alone, and he will leave you alone. But there were plenty of cartoons where Tom might be minding his own business when Jerry would show up, start trouble, and somehow still come out on top. By the logic of the cartoons I preferred anyway, Jerry should only win if Tom starts the fight. If Tom quits for whatever reason, Jerry should too, but that little scamp never seemed to get that.
Anyway, for some reason there’s a live action/animation hybrid Tom & Jerry movie now.
The movie opens showing three characters all more or less converging on the same location. Tom is an aspiring piano player looking to make it big while earning a living pretending to be blind while playing in the park. Jerry is moving into the big city. And Kayla (Chloe Grace Moretz) has lost her job doing odd jobs and is out looking to maybe scam her way into a new one. After Jerry interferes with Tom’s playing for…some reason (see my opening paragraph), the two immediately begin chasing and fighting each other, with Tom more or less getting the worse end of it at every turn. Kayla, meanwhile, uses another woman’s resume to get a job assisting at a fancy hotel where a big time wedding is about to take place between Ben (Colin Jost) and Preeta (Pallavi Sharda).
Why are these two so big in this universe? I assume they’re actors or something, but I don’t recall the movie saying. Ben is rather bland and dull which actually fits Jost’s persona as Saturday Night Live‘s current Weekend Update co-anchor and co-head writer, but doesn’t really fit in well to the movie itself. All I know is, I kept wondering if he got this part due to his recent wedding to Scarlett Johansson.
Regardless, Jerry moves into the hotel, and if Kayla wants to keep her job needs to get rid of the mouse, eventually enlisting Tom’s help in doing so. From there, we get the standard Tom & Jerry style hi-jinks where the pair fight, act friendly, avoid other hostile animals like Spike the bulldog, and generally break things. The rest is fairly predictable with the best performance (and this isn’t saying much) going to the generally reliable Michael Pena as the hotel’s event organizer, the closest thing the movie has to a villain.
Now, given that Tom and Jerry individually don’t seem to really have much in the way of personalities, and since neither of them talk (which is something of a minor reoccurring joke), and their best-known work is in the form of a series of shorts, how do you stretch out something like “a cat and a mouse abuse each other for six minutes” into a feature length film? Short answer: make the movie as much about bland and forgettable human characters as it is about the two-dimensional cartoon cat and mouse. Many of Tom and Jerry’s antics I actually recognized from some of their old shorts, and the movie does make an interesting choice in that, while all the humans are played by flesh and blood actors, every single animal in the movie is a cartoon character of some kind, and the lengths the movie goes to in order to keep that idea going is actually at times the closest it comes to true creativity. But this movie was more formulaic than funny, and even if you are a true Tom & Jerry fan, you’re better off with the old shorts.
Grade: C-
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