Part of the problem with a 100-minute movie called Tom & Jerry is that its title characters were best served by the short-form format in which they first became stars. That's about as fascinating as this movie gets (since it never quite feels like clarifying why some animals talk, and others, like Tom and Jerry themselves, do not).

If there's an interesting choice in the film, it's the decision that every animal is animated.

As Kayla tries to keep her new job, she finds challenges in the form of, among other problems, the cat and mouse who have descended on the hotel in the hopes of finding new digs. Kayla (Chloe Grace Moretz) is trying to secure a job and lies her way into an interim position at a tony New York City hotel the very week that it's hosting an enormously fancy wedding. Much of the plot of Tom & Jerry hinges on characters who are, in a fascinating but not terribly wise choice, not named Tom or Jerry. Do kids care about Tom & Jerry? Maybe not, but it's existing IP and WarnerMedia needs to mine it for all it's worth. Whether younger audiences are familiar with the eponymous cat and mouse who constantly get into outsized scuffles is immaterial both the audience and these cartoon icons are ill-served by a movie that appears to have been conjured out of whole cloth by an executive drive to exhume intellectual property come hell or high water. The story is dull, the characters are single-dimensionally bland, and the performances are stiff. But it fails in so many basic ways of cinematic storytelling. Tom & Jerry is, in many ways, aiming to be a live-action cartoon.

Plenty of actors can now add to their CV that they've worked opposite characters of some kind that are created in post-production, but only a handful or two can claim that they did it well. As I watched talented actors struggle their way through a creaky script that could have just as easily been unearthed from a time capsule of the 1990s, or the 1970s, or the 1950s, and spruced up a bit, I thought about how difficult it truly must have been for Hoskins to not only 'interact' with animated characters in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, but how few actors since have effectively followed his example. I spent a large chunk of the experience of watching Tom & Jerry thinking about the late Bob Hoskins.

Tom and jerry movies 1990s