TOM AND JERRY (2021) - Film Review

‘Tom and Jerry’ is directed by Tim Story and stars Chloë Grace Moretz, Michael Peña, Colin Jost and Pallavi Sharda and follows the two titular fan favorites- Tom and Jerry- as they run into each other and keep trying to outsmart each other till they meet Moretz’s character, Kayla, who works at a really lavish hotel and is managing a wedding between two crazy rich people and gets annoyed and vexed when a cat and a mouse, in an attempt to outsmart each other, cause destruction which might potentially hinder the wedding.

I will be honest with you all, I loved the TV show. It was fun to watch a cat chase a mouse and the mouse outwitting the cat in hilarious ways for majority of the show. There was no element of story or continuity to it, it was just a cartoon about a cat and a mouse, which was slapstick humor that worked for kids. Unfortunately, some studio executives found ways to raise revenue by making a film about a cartoon that has no plot (as they have done in the past too with Smurfs) and release it into theatres only to grab some easy cash since it’s ‘Tom and Jerry’ and many people become nostalgic upon hearing the name. This is as shocking as it is disgusting because this film didn’t work for me. ‘Tom and Jerry’ was a mess from the starting to the end-credits, with minimal number of scenes with the beloved duo, human characters who were boring and completely forgettable, slapstick humor that didn’t land and a plot that makes the plot of ‘Extraction’ sound like the plot of ‘Lord of the Rings’.

I’ll tell you this, I can watch a cartoon show about a cat chasing a mouse, because there is no plot involved and it’s hilarious to watch for a duration of 15-20 minutes, but I won’t buy into a film about those two characters and I wouldn’t sit through a 100-minutes of runtime to watch a film which is about two rich people getting married with occasional inputs from Tom and Jerry, who are literally the titular characters. I can imagine what the script writers had to go through when writing the script because it’s kind of hard to follow a storyline about a TV show that has no story to begin with. The struggle is conspicuous in the film as they try to build a story people would be invested in, and in their struggle to come up with a cohesive story, they completely forget about the titular characters. That’s right, Tom and Jerry are ignored for most of this film and they only insert one or two scenes with them to remind you that this film is about them, which is sad. The film mostly focuses on Kayla, played by Moretz, and try to sketch a character arc for her which is actually something nobody would want to see when they have paid to watch Tom and Jerry and their hilarious chase sequences. Unfortunately an absurd amount of time is spent trying to set up this ‘grand wedding’ between two rich people, how Kayla is managing the wedding and how Michael Peña disagrees with Kayla for weird reasons. There are only a few, handful number of scenes where Tom and Jerry appear, try to stop each other, cause some destruction and mess up a few rooms, and then we jump back into the boring storyline following this fancy wedding. It left me disappointed as a long time ‘Tom and Jerry’ fan, and agitated as well.

Even the comedy fails in this film. The comedy is mostly carried out by the human characters -since Tom and Jerry can’t talk and the scriptwriters chose jokes to carry the comedy- and they fall flat. The film follows an approach that I don’t approve of- that is making characters talk and talk only for them to realize that they are only bringing embarrassment to themselves. This is the type of comedy that is made to be funny, but it ends up being annoying and absurd.

To conclude, ‘Tom and Jerry’ is a comedy film that fails at being funny, has some of the most mundane, one-dimensional characters of all time and only a few appearances from the titular characters who are the reason people would want to watch this film in the first place. It’s not a wave of nostalgia that hits you while watching this film, it’s rather a wave of disgust that pushes you to believe that this is a cash grab, and not a good one.

I will give ‘Tom and Jerry’ a F.

Thank you for reading my review of this film. Stay tuned for more!