Finally catching up to the meme community, Warner Bros. has made some dumb new Tom & Jerry content for us with an all-out movie. Have a look with this first trailer.
Here’s the good news: Tom and Jerry are not repulsive CGI freaks. There need not be any Sonic-style outrage over Jerry’s tiny body being oddly muscular with grimy little teeth. Quite the opposite, they’re actually more faithful 3-D recreations of the original models than even The Peanuts Movie. They don’t even have celebrity voices!
The bad news is that this is otherwise such A Studio Tom & Jerry movie. Like everything from Sonic to the Smurfs, the film needlessly insists on bringing these cartoon characters into the live-action real world. Well, a real world where animals all look like cartoons, which is honestly a solid workaround for the premise. (It’s actually more stressed that they’re headed to the “big city,” as if they’re typically so pastoral.)
Digging up the somehow evergreen trope of the Manhattan hotel filled with haughty employees deserving of our contempt, the film takes sort of the Dunston Checks In approach. Jerry has taken up residence in The Royal Gate, where the “wedding of the century” is set to take place and involve Colin Jost. Chloë Grace Moretz stars as the employee Rob Delaney has tasked with catching the mouse. She decides to try using a cat, and then it’s slapstick time. Michael Peña and Ken Jeong co-star as a reminder that having Peña chase Jeong around in Cats-style CGI would have been the more interesting Tom & Jerry adaptation.
