Tom and Jerry: Film Review

Cast: Tom, Jerry, Spike, Chloe Grace Moretz, Michael Pena

Director: Tim Story

A mix of animation and live action is what befits a potential reboot of the oldest cat and mouse game in cartoon history - and for the large part, it actually kind of works.

Having the good grace not to give Tom and Jerry voices, the story centres around Jerry looking for a new place to live - and he settles on a downtown, upmarket New York Hotel. However, Tom's not impressed when Jerry crashes his lucrative piano playing gig, and sets out to destroy him.

To complicate matters further, Chloe Grace Moretz's Kayla, a chancer who's down on her luck, manages to talk her way into a temporary gig at the hotel, on the eve of a major showbiz wedding and setting her on a collision course with both Michael Pena's jealous events manager and a cat and mouse rivalry nearly 80 years in the making.

There is much to love about Tom and Jerry the 2021 movie.

When the film concentrates on the simple pent-up aggression between the two, the film soars. Sequences such as Tom repeatedly trying - and failing - to cross a wire to get to Jerry inside the hotel are simply sublime, a reminder of the 1940s Hanna Barbera cartoons which were the staple of many Saturday morning viewing and a precursor to the more violent Itchy and Scratchy characters from The Simpsons.

Story understands here the film's simple MO - to show Tom single mindedly pursuing a mouse who will outwit him every time, and failing and flailing miserably while all others around are caught up in the maelstrom of mayhem. And it works everytime.

Unfortunately though, the film chooses to mire its best elements in a more screwball plot about two people having an Indian wedding (clearly modelled on Jonas and Priyanka Chopra's wedding) and some rivalries in the hotel.

Moretz acquits herself reasonably well, playing it straight when needed and leaning into the more absurd edges when necessary. However, Pena plays up his part a little too much, and despite his usual comedic potential, sells himself short from a script that positions him more as the misunderstood bad guy than anything else.

It all comes together in a sickly sentimental finale that overwhelms what's gone before and more or less sidelines its titular characters, rendering the first hour of the film almost forgotten in a mess of well-intentioned gloop.

Thankfully, when Tom and Jerry works it really does it well, leaning into the legacy of the characters and bringing its more traditional edges to the fore. It's here that Tom and Jerry deserve to be remembered - not for the human cat and mouse "shenanigans" which are obligatory to make the film reach its 100 minutes run time, but which make you yearn for the directors to have simply left the cat and mouse at it for 99 of those 100 minutes instead.