Tom & Jerry (2021)

User Review

• 

  d_riptide

  2 / 10

  For those of you who’ve been living under a rock for the past half-century, Tom & Jerry have gone down in history as the original frenemies; they are synonymous with the term ‘cat-and-mouse’ game as well as never ending rivalries. Never paid as much attention to them back when I was a wee-little lad (and full disclosure, I thought they were long gone by this point) but leave it to Hollywood to resurrect my curiosity as they bring the beloved cat and mouse duo back to the silver screen after a mixed bag from their 1992 outing. I knew this wasn’t something I was going to be completely invested in but for someone familiar with the source material, the million dollar question was ‘How do you adapt two animated characters from 7-8 minute shorts into an 101 minute movie?’
  
  Answer is it’s an never an easy solution.....but anything, almost ANYTHING would’ve been better than this. You know you flamingo’d up when I say this is the first time in FOREVER that I almost actively WALKED OUT on a movie.
  
  
  The importance when adapting short film characters for feature films is to keep the original spirit of the characters intact; everything this movie constantly fights against from the moment the film starts. Despite not having them speak, they force Tom And Jerry far out of their element and have them deviate widely from the original source material; more specifically having them barely show up in their own movie. On top of that, it follows beat by beat the formula of every other movie that adapts an older cartoon into live action: we’re stuck with either very bland or very annoying humans who we don’t relate to or give a shit about, recycled jokes, cringe humor tied with really mediocre slapstick with two exceptions, the blending of animation with live-action looked and felt fake as all hell from the get-go and even if you can look past ALL of that, I can’t support any film made for kids if it’s going to treat it’s own target audience as dribbling dipshits. Even as well paced, well edited and surprisingly well shot everything is and Chloë Grace Moretz getting me to chuckle a couple of times, it means diddly dick in the grand scheme of things. Pretty it up all you want, it’s just lipstick on a pig.
  
  It's easier to construct a narrative to entertain and occupy an audience's attention for a few minutes but when the running time is abusively longer, so must the narrative and I could tell they either really straining to come up with anything beyond the basic summary or just gave up halfway through because the idea already turned up a profit and thus wasn’t worth anymore effort.
  
  I just don’t get it; Alvin And The Chipmunks, The Smurfs, Transformers, Yogi Bear, now Tom And Jerry too? How in the living hell do they keep getting away with charging $10 to $20 in ticket sales for a movie where the beloved IP’s are barely in their own film with crude humor, recycled jokes, one-note cookie cutter humans and barely a story in which they spin their wheels not getting anything accomplished for TWO straight HOURS?! The only good thing about this film is the title; they warned off any longtime fans from watching this shit. There is ZERO reason to watch this this weekend unless you’re looking for another benchmark for one of the laziest damn films in existence.

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