Review: Tom & Jerry
Tom & Jerry, directed by Tim Story, tells the tale of Kayla Forester (Chloë Grace Moretz), a street smart young girl looking to make ends meet. Her luck begins to turn though when she finds an opportunity (through questionable means) to work at a hotel that hiring more staff to help prepare for an extravagant wedding for New York’s most popular couple. But things get complicated for her when the hotel seems to have gotten an unwelcomed guest in the form of a mouse named Jerry causing some mischief for the hotel guests and staff. With the help of a piano-playing street cat named Tom, Kayla must do all she can to get things under control before the big wedding.
If you read that synopsis you might have noticed something: for a movie that’s called Tom & Jerry it doesn’t seem to have much of a focus on Tom and Jerry, which honestly wouldn’t be too bad as long as the rest of the movie is compelling on its own. Sadly however, the rest of this movie kinda sucks.
You see when you’re trying to make a movie based on a well-established property you need to understand that there are some properties that don’t translate well into a feature length film. Tom & Jerry I personally believe is one of those properties, simply because if you watched ANY Tom & Jerry cartoon, new or old doesn’t matter, then you know how the formula goes. Sure they might change it up every other episode but at the end of the day each episode consists of Tom trying to catch Jerry with a lot of slapstick shenanigans. It’s hard to stretch that out for ninety minutes without either having Tom and Jerry be secondary characters to their own movie or having their shtick get old real quick, and for this film the former ended up happening; there just wasn’t enough Tom and Jerry in this Tom & Jerry movie.
The story is about as generic as you can get with kids films, the main character is pretty unlikable at times, the humor is painfully unfunny, visually everything screams mediocrity. It doesn’t feel like I’m watching a multi-million dollar movie; everything looks SO fake, and I’m not talking about the animated animals that populate the world (which is a nice touch I’ll give them that). Nothing really stands out; it’s a factory manufactured product made to keep young children occupied for ninety minutes.
I mean it’s not entirely bad; there were a few neat things this film did. Unlike most of the animal characters in the film at least Tom and Jerry don’t talk, which has happened before in a past movie in case you didn’t know (and it turned out exactly how you’d imagined it would’ve). The film does capture what makes Tom and Jerry so beloved, right down to those classic Tom yells. Some of the slapstick was fun to watch and a couple of those cringe-worthy reference jokes even got a chuckle out of me once in a while (specifically a blink-and-you’ll-miss reference to Mel Brook’s Young Frankenstein that caught me off guard), but again, you can only do so much stretching a Tom & Jerry cartoon into ninety minutes.
Overall I had a hard time watching this one. It’s not as painful to watch as last year’s Scoob!, but it still hurts watching this due to how absolutely mediocre everything was. Kids will gobble this up just fine, there’s nothing offensive about this film at all, but I’d rather just show them the cartoons instead. At least the cartoons actually have Tom and Jerry as the focus. I don’t know you do you but I’d personally skip this one.
Final Verdict: 2/10