Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties (2006)

Two years after the first installment, Garfield follows his owner to the United Kingdom, swaps places with a lookalike cat who has inherited a castle, and spends the better part of ninety minutes being fed by a butler. That is the entire proposition. The film is a sequel, it descends loosely from Mark Twain by way of a picnic basket, and it wants nothing more than for small children to laugh at a fat cat falling off a table. We submit it for classification, and the ledger comes back blank.

The cast is white, English, and assembled from the familiar stock of British character acting: a butler, four solicitors, a lord who intends to demolish the estate and build condominiums. Liz, the veterinarian, exists to be proposed to and later held at blunderbuss point, which is a thin arc even by the standards of a film in which a ferret has a speaking role. Lord Dargis is greedy, but his greed is aristocratic and hereditary, fixed on a castle he believes is rightfully his. This is not an indictment of wealth. It is a property dispute with a bulldog in it.

Nothing here lectures. There is no message, no moral instruction, no scene in which a character explains to the audience how it ought to behave. The animals learn to make lasagna. Garfield learns that he is slovenly and greedy, briefly, then helps with the engagement. For a film nominated for two Golden Raspberry Awards and dismissed by roughly twelve percent of critics, it carries an oddly clean conscience. Bill Murray supplies the voice, reportedly under the impression he had agreed to a Coen brothers picture. What remains is a children's comedy that offends no one, instructs no one, and means nothing at all. In this house, we respect that.