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Tom & Jerry, review: an embarrassing attempt to make two cartoon icons ‘relevant’

Jerry and Tom speed towards disaster in this new Warner Bros turkey - Warner Bros
Jerry and Tom speed towards disaster in this new Warner Bros turkey - Warner Bros
  • Dir: Tim Story. Cast: Chloë Grace Moretz, Michael Peña, Rob Delaney, Colin Jost, Pallavi Sharda, Patsy Ferran. PG cert, 101 mins

During the last three lockdowns, I’ve always asked my seven- and eight-year-old sons to sit in on the new family films I’ve reviewed: some have been wonderful and others dreadful, with most falling somewhere between the two extremes. Tom & Jerry is the first during which they got up and went to get on with some homework instead.

Honestly, I would have joined them if I could. Fronted adverbials hold all the appeal of a new Pixar masterpiece compared to this shatteringly crummy exercise, in which the famous cat-and-mouse act run riot in a version of New York City that looks as if it could be situated inside a warehouse near Watford – and in fact was, since the film was shot at Leavesden Studios in Hertfordshire.

One thing to be said in Tom & Jerry’s favour is that Tom and Jerry themselves do not talk in it: a fatal error in the unloved Tom and Jerry: The Movie, which was released in 1992. In place of the bad choices of the past, though, is a whole new smorgasbord of horrors: the film opens on three rapping pigeons who perform A Tribe Called Quest’s Can I Kick It? in its entirety, and somehow goes downhill from there.

The plot will delight all children who have dreamed of seeing two Hanna-Barbera slapstick icons becoming peripherally involved with a glamorous wedding between two social media influencers, Preeta (Pallavi Sharda) and Ben (Colin Jost). The venue for the Instagram event of the season is a stately old hotel on the edge of Central Park, allegedly, which also happens to be where Jerry makes his home shortly after arriving in town. Tom is immediately hired to chase him back out again before the ceremony by Kayla (Chloë Grace Moretz), a young casualty of the city’s gig economy who has just bluffed her way into what she hopes will be a steady job.

Unlike Who Framed Roger Rabbit – a film which, despite having been made 33 years ago, still looks centuries ahead of Tom & Jerry in every respect – there’s no crafty explanation for the presence of animated characters in an otherwise live-action world. It’s just as simple and arbitrary as having all the animals we see (and, chillingly, also the meat) represented on screen as cartoons.

There are a number of scenes in which members of the flesh-and-blood cast – usually Kayla and her eternally suspicious boss, played by Michael Peña – have to interact physically with Tom, Jerry and various other creatures, all rendered in a vaguely three-dimensional take on the classic hand-drawn style. But the two mediums never convincingly mesh – nothing here is remotely as convincing as the sequence in the 1945 MGM musical Anchors Aweigh in which Jerry danced with Gene Kelly – and even the relatively small number of sequences in which Tom and Jerry actually get to chase each other through the hotel corridors or around the city in the time-honoured fashion feel disturbingly unfastened from reality itself.

Of course, the same could be said for the rationale behind the whole project. Who on earth thought the best possible use for one of the most celebrated cartoon double acts ever invented would be as peripheral characters in a PG-rated version of Bride Wars? Yet essentially – astonishingly – the Tom and Jerry sections of Tom & Jerry are a sideshow, used to punctuate the human scheming and blundering around Preeta and Ben’s forthcoming nuptials.

In addition to the social media material (“Insta-Book-Face and the Ticky-Tock,” Peña splutters), there are notable appearances from a remote-controlled camera drone, an electric skateboard and the poo emoji, while selfies are taken and a reference is made to the rapper Drake. The film seems actively embarrassed that its headline characters became famous in the 1940s, though it may well be the 2040s before my own toes have fully uncurled.

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