The Movie Guru: ‘Furiosa’ packs an emotional punch, while ‘The Garfield Movie’ boringly generic
Warner Bros./Courtesy photo
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (in theaters)
A really good prequel requires a delicate balance.
We know it can’t solve everything because we were here for the mess at the start of the next movie, but it should let the central characters accomplish something. It should tell us more about the characters we already know, enough that it deepens or alters our feelings about the original movie. Ideally, it should get us excited to watch the original movie all over again.
“Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga,” which tells the backstory of Charlize Theron’s character in “Mad Max: Fury Road,” nails every single one of these points. It’s got a gripping character arc that beautifully sets up both Furiosa’s character and everything that happens in “Fury Road,” answering a ton of questions and enriching everything we know about her.
It’s satisfying all on its own, leaving you with a feeling of resolution and accomplishment that somehow makes the original movie feel even more necessary. It’s a dark, largely sad story, as fans of other “Mad Max” movies already know, but if you already like this universe then this is an essential entry.
The movie covers more than a decade of Furiosa’s life, which leaves it with a slightly episodic quality that delivers satisfying smaller stories in service of the larger one. A lot of terrible things happen, though both Anya Taylor-Joy and Alyla Browne as young Furiosa make it clear that our heroine has been a fighter from the very beginning.
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Even though we have a pretty good idea of what’s coming, they make it impossible to look away. No prequel could ask for anything more.
Grade: Three and a half stars
The Garfield Movie (in theaters)
The reason that last year’s “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” worked so well was that the people who made it clearly loved the characters. You could feel that love in every scene, and audience members who loved the characters responded in droves.
I’m not sure anyone who made “The Garfield Movie” has spent any real time with Garfield. Yes, there’s some scattered talk about Garfield’s love of eating, laziness and lasagna, but the bulk of the film is utterly generic and forgettable. The creators had years of comic strips and animated specials to work with, complete with a beloved cast of characters and a unique deadpan feel cherished by fans, but there’s almost no trace of any of that in this movie. You could replace the main character with literally any animated pet and it would change almost nothing about the movie.
After an intro to establish the laziness and overeating, the movie kidnaps Garfield and Odie and abruptly introduces Garfield’s absent criminal father. It then sends them on a random adventure involving stealing milk to pay back his father’s debt to a feline criminal kingpin. In the middle of all this are bonding moments between Garfield and his father, and a single running gag that serves as almost all of Jon’s screen time.
Though there are moments in the beginning that almost feel like the old animated series, most of it feels like every B-grade animated movie made since the mid-2000s. In the old days, this was the kind of movie that would have come out direct-to-DVD and used to occupy small children in the afternoons.
Garfield and his fans both deserve better.
Grade: One and a half stars
Jenniffer Wardell is an award-winning movie critic and member of the Denver Film Critics Society. Find her on Twitter at @wardellwriter or drop her a line at themovieguruslc@gmail.com.
