Directed by Tim Story, Tom & Jerry follows the “legendary rivals” as they take their slapstick shenanigans to New York City. Jerry moves into New York City’s finest hotel, the Royal Gate Hotel, on the eve of the wedding of the century, which forces the desperate event planner (Michael Pena) to hire Tom to get rid of Jerry, with the help of a young employee (Chloe Grace Moretz). As mayhem ensues, the escalating cat-and-mouse battle soon threatens to destroy her career, the wedding, and possibly the hotel itself.
So I grew up with Tom and Jerry as a kid and I loved them a lot. I remember tuning into my TV to watch them almost religiously. Even today I sometimes find and watch old episodes of Tom and Jerry because of just how hilarious and awesome they were. They were the kings of animated slapstick comedy and a lot of it does hold up to this day.
But as the years have passed Tom and Jerry have ended up losing their once grand popularity, following a string of failures from various creators to keep the IP alive. Ever since they were passed on from their original creators, William Hanna & Joseph Barbera, it feels like nobody knew what the hell to do with them. There have been spin-offs, reboots and a number of animated movies that have attempted to re-capture the magic of the original series, sometimes in ridiculous ways.
Cut to the present day where somebody in Warner Bros decided it was time for Tom and Jerry to come to live action and hit the big screen, which leads us to this movie. And after watching it I have to ask: Why does this exist? Who asked for it? And more importantly, how could you make an adaptation of Tom and Jerry this bad?
To put it in perspective, this movie is part of the unfortunate genre of films that takes beloved cartoon characters and puts them in a real world setting, with live action characters that you don’t give a shit about who get more screen time than the cartoon characters. And of course you get the awful cringey comedy as the required add on. Some examples of this genre include The Smurfs and the Alvin & the Chipmunks movies.
In short, I fucking hated this movie. It’s not a Tom and Jerry movie, it’s a live action mediocre comedy film for kids featuring Tom and Jerry. You could tell the filmmakers had no clue what they were doing when making this film, especially with the plot and handling of the characters. All Tom and Jerry do the whole movie is pretty much beat the shit out of each other through slapstick that isn’t really that funny.
I didn’t have high hopes for this movie but I was at least hoping that anything with those two could at least be entertaining, but yet it somehow fails at that too. There’s only so many times I can watch them injure each other in a 101 minute movie before it gets boring. And trust me it gets boring real fast.
For most of the movie we have to suffer through an abysmal story that has poor acting, childish comedy and so many pointless and cliche subplots that you have seen a number of times in awful kid films. Why do so many studios still think kids need films that love to treat kids like morons and deliver really shitty life lessons? No joke, this movie gives kids terrible advice and gives them awful characters to look up to, like our lead played by Chloe Grace Moretz.
When we are introduced to her she uses despicable means to land a job at the hotel, which is somehow presented to be as a good thing as well as a reason to root for this character. Now I love Chloe Grace Moretz, but by god is she awful in this, especially with some of the crap dialogue she and every other actor is given. Even the amazingly hilarious Michael Pena is reduced to a lifeless, unfunny husk that desperately tries to make the jokes he’s given funny, but fails.
A lot of characters are pretty much walking cliches that only have quirks to define them and nothing else. And of course they are given a lot of unfunny scenes and plot threads that you couldn’t care less about.
There are other animated characters that do show up, but they barely have much of an impact on the story, and are just either there in the background or used for some of Tom and Jerry’s shenanigans. Also, this movie has 4th wall breaking cartoon pigeons that continuously interrupt the movie to remind us of the plot and treat the audience as if they were idiots. Pretty much this whole movie treats everyone like an idiot… kids included.
And on a technical level, while the animation of the characters is fine, I’ve seen it done before in many other movies and they felt much more out of place in this. There’s nothing interesting with the cinematography, the editing is lazy, and the music is pretty much forgettable and not worth mentioning.
If you’ve seen the live action Smurfs, Yogi Bear, Alvin & the Chipmunks and other movies that fall in the same category, that’s basically what this 2021 Tom and Jerry movie is: a cheap ass nostalgia cash grab that had no point being made other than to milk an IP that has lost its popularity long ago. It’s best to just skip this and watch something that is far more investing. I’m going to give Tom & Jerry an F.
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