‘Tom and Jerry’ Review: Classic Cartoon Gets an Adaptation That Doesn’t Belong in Any Generation

It turns out that making a feature-length live action-animated hybrid movie about two characters who don’t speak is hard, particularly when the human half makes no sense.

At least “Tom and Jerry” never pretends to be something that it isn’t. From the opening sounds of the new feature-length adaptation of the classic cartoon, it’s readily apparent what audiences are in for. The hook from the beginning of A Tribe Called Quest’s “Can I Kick It?” plays over the baffling new Warner Bros. water tower intro and before you know it, an animated pigeon is lip-syncing to Q-Tip.

There’s little in the following hour and forty minutes that shows any more sense of purpose, a hodgepodge of story and sight gags that goes together about as well as its attempts at combining live action and animation. It’s a “Tom and Jerry” movie that, for some reason, opts to focus on a pair of fictional Instagram celebrities and the ins and outs of hotel administration, whether or not the computer-generated cat and mouse implied by the title happen to be involved.

A significant portion of the movie revolves around Kayla (Chloe Grace Moretz), a character who successfully swindles her way into a job at a swanky New York hotel mere days before the wedding of Ben (Colin Jost) and Preeta (Pallavi Sharda), the social event of the season. Going off absolutely nothing other than a pilfered resume and thirty seconds of small talk, hotel manager Mr. Dubros (Rob Delaney) hires her to the temp staff, under the supervision (and objections) of events manager Terence (Michael Peña). Terence quickly cools on Kayla for the same reason that Tom and Jerry are constantly feuding: just because.

Before long, the runup to Ben and Preeta’s wedding collides headlong with the latest round of destructive Tom-Jerry bouts, endangering the psychological well-being of everyone involved and giving Kayla a growing, disproportionate list of responsibilities. Not only are Kayla and company unphased by the presence of animated animals, they eventually join forces in a “Toontown but without the prejudice and rigid social hierarchy” kind of way. This all happens without giving Tom or Jerry a speaking voice, as 1993’s “Tom and Jerry: The Movie” did.

Despite this confounding packaging, “Tom and Jerry” isn’t completely devoid of its animation history DNA. Maybe the one element that keeps this movie from being an entirely wasted effort is that amidst the bizarre machinations of luxury hotel event managing, there’s some room for good old fashioned, one-on-one comic mayhem. Tom and Jerry trash duvet covers, smash up lounge pianos, and draw the unwanted attention of the classic bulldog antagonist Spike. (When not rabies-level foaming on the camera or defecating on the streets of New York City, he’s voiced by Bobby Cannavale at his most, well, cartoonish).

It’s when this version of “Tom and Jerry” starts trying to squeeze those humans into this setup that both worlds feel smashed together and equally lifeless. (In both the at-times-offputting animation style and its relative place/quality in an established, beloved tradition, this should pair nicely on HBO Max with “Earwig and the Witch.”)