The great thing about making The Garfield Movie is that, unlike most IP-driven adaptations, director Mark Dindal isn’t beholden to a great deal of lore. Jim Davis’s long-running comic strip has seen the flabby feline eat, sleep, and torment Odie the dog and Jon the human in innumerable ways since 1978, with little variation in formula. This frees up screenwriters Paul A. Kaplan, Mark Torgove, and David Reynolds to essentially tell whatever story they want without trying to introduce some cockamamie origin story or get to a specific point in Garfield’s timeline. Unfortunately, this doesn’t stop The Garfield Movie from feeling like a lazy version of what it could be.

We all know Garfield (voiced by Chris Pratt) loves lasagna, hates Mondays, and begrudgingly tolerates Odie (supposedly voiced by Harvey Guillén though he just barks and yips), and exploits Jon (Nicholas Hoult) for his cozy lifestyle. But what about Garfield’s life before Jon and Odie? Turns out he was an abandoned kitten, left in an alleyway by his father, Vic (Samuel L. Jackson) before finding Jon at an Italian restaurant. Years later, Garfield is kidnapped by Jinx (Hannah Waddingham), another cat and former partner of Vic and their milk stealing organization.

If all of this sounds convoluted and bizarre to you, I can assure you, it gets weirder. Jinx gives Garfield, Vic, and Odie 72 hours to rob a milk farm since Vic stiffed Jinx years ago. But in order to rob the high security facility, they have to train under the tutelage of Otto the bull (Ving Rhames), half of the farm’s mascots. There’s plenty of fun and funny moments peppered in, with zippy editing and plenty of action sequences. But none of it ever feels vital to Garfield; you could essentially make the same film with different characters and lose nothing. It’s a good-looking film, with faithful character designs, but you need more than pretty images to make a memorable film.

Pratt caught a good amount of flack when it was announced he would voice the iconic cat, and while I don’t place the blame at his paws for the film, he is undoubtedly miscast. Bill Murray gave it a try with a pair of live-action films in the early 2000’s, and did fine enough, but Pratt is too lively, too energetic to nail Garfield’s malaise. Strangely, the most questionable casting decision goes to Hoult – an actor I always like to see – as Jon, whose high-pitched accent sounds like an adolescent trying to pass as a real adult.

The story isn’t as lazy in The Garfield Movie as Pratt’s previous animated fare, The Super Mario Bros. Movie, but it all just feels inconsequential. My kids both loved it (and my wife hated it), but I doubt they’ll be aching to return to the film once it becomes more readily available. Now, a few days after seeing the film, I struggle to recall much beyond the insane amount of product placement throughout, and the usage of the Mission: Impossible and Top Gun themes. (They’re both Paramount films, and Garfield is a Sony production. Yes, my brain is broken.) It’s not impossible to adapt a film from flimsy material. Heck, Disney made a seemingly endless Pirates of the Caribbean franchise out of a theme park ride. But perhaps The Garfield Movie should have stuck to its three panels in the newspaper.

The Garfield Movie will be in theaters nationwide on May 24.

OSCAR POTENTIAL:

• If The Super Mario Bros. Movie couldn’t crack the field last year after making almost a billion dollars, don’t expect The Garfield Movie to be in the conversation either.