TOM AND JERRY (2021) **

The first sign you are in trouble with this reboot of the beloved cartoon duo comes before the opening titles even hit the screen.  Things start out surprisingly enough with the familiar opening chords of Lou Reed’s iconic “Walk on the Wild Side”.  I thought to myself, “Wow, that’s such a cool cut for a kid’s movie.  Maybe this will be…” and right then and there, it morphed into this shitty rap song that merely sampled the beat.  I hate it when they do that.  Just come up with your own shit.  Don’t rip off a classic.

Which is precisely what the whole movie is.  It only takes what it wants from the great Tom and Jerry cartoons of the past and uses it for its own means.  When Tom and Jerry are doing their thing, it’s tolerable, but when the film tries to do its own thing, it’s pretty awful. 

The plot has Tom chasing Jerry into a swanky New York hotel.  It is here where an out of work whippersnapper (Chloe Grace Moretz) grifts her way into a job.  To maintain her position, she must keep the place rodent-free, which means catching Jerry before the guests find out there is a mouse in the house.

Turning Tom and Jerry loose inside a hotel while C-rate guest stars pop in and out wouldn’t be the worst idea in the world if the script didn’t focus on the human characters and rely on them to prop up the story.  Nobody cares about Moretz trying to keep her job.  (There’s a reason why the humans were only shown from the knees down in the old cartoons.)  We just want to see Jerry beat the shit out of Tom for 101 minutes, thank you very much.  Which, thank God, still happens, although not as much as you’d like.  (Tom gets ran over by trucks, has doors slammed on his head, is bludgeoned by a baseball bat, and is electrocuted several times.)

It’s not all bad though.  I was relieved the filmmakers resisted the temptation to turn the characters into CGI monstrosities.  Keeping Tom and Jerry in their original hand-drawn animation form (albeit in a slightly airbrushed style) was a smart move.  I guess PETA would’ve had a shit-fit if a photorealistic CGI cat was repeatedly mutilated over and over again.  There’s even a couple scenes where Tom and Jerry drink alcohol, so it’s not completely neutered like some modern-day versions of old cartoons.  We also get a cameo by a familiar face that Tom and Jerry fans will no doubt enjoy seeing. 

All this, at the very least, makes it better than 1992’s Tom and Jerry:  The Movie, which was a total disgrace to the source material as the concerned parents, outraged by the duo’s decades of violence towards one another, demanded that they be FRIENDS for the bulk of the picture.  (They become friends in this one too, but it’s more like a temporary détente to help Moretz salvage her job.)  It doesn’t excuse the gratuitous human characters, which include Michael Pena as the hotel manager, Ken Jeong as the chef on the premises, and Colin Jost, who as Weekend Update anchors-turned-actors go, is no Dennis Miller.  Nor is it enough to save the movie, which only contains a handful of laughs.  It could’ve been way worse I suppose, but I think there’s a reason why a cat chasing a mouse works best in eight-minute shorts. 

AKA:  Tom and Jerry:  The Movie.