Directed by Tim Story
Written by Kevin Costello
Starring Tom, Jerry, Chloë Grace Moretz, Michael Peña, Colin Jost
Rated PG for cartoon violence, rude humor and brief language
Runtime: 1 hour 41 minutes
In theaters and on HBO Max Feb. 26

by Alex Rudolph, Staff Writer

Tom and Jerry, a movie that asks the question "What if there were a fifteenth Tom and Jerry movie?," opens with a pigeon lip syncing to A Tribe Called Quest's "Can I Kick It?" and ends with a Maybach Music needle drop, is much less embarrassing than you'd expect a rap-filled adaptation of a '40s cartoon to be. This isn't Space Jam, trying to convince you the material is cool. It isn't really trying to convince you of anything you wouldn't already feel about Tom and Jerry. If you're familiar with the idea that cats don't like mice but sometimes need to put aside their differences to sustain a 100-minute-long narrative, you have some idea how this is going to play out.

TJ2k21's primary mutation of the formula is that we're now in a real, live-action New York City. The humans are played by game actors like Chloë Grace Moretz and Michael Peña and the animals, from Tom and Jerry to random insects, are all animated. That's just the way it is. Dimensions weren't bridged and cartoon characters weren't sucked into reality, Tom and Jerry just takes place in a world where people and animals obey different laws of physics. Fists get big right before a big punch, torsos stretch when characters run. This is smart–there's nothing creepier than an animated Garfield interacting with a skin and bone Odie. There's some floatiness when human and animal characters directly interact, but everything here is closer to Roger Rabbit than Cool World on the People Touching Cartoons animation scale.

When we meet the title characters, Tom is a fake-blind pianist in Central Park and Jerry blows the cover on his hustle, breaking Tom's keyboard while trying to take his money. They've never run into each other before, and in this way, Tom and Jerry is an origin story (though, oddly, it has a different style and story than the Tom and Jerry series HBO Max launches in a few weeks). Our heroes are houseless and struggling to make it in New York, which is sad but at least closes the door on a Mammy Two Shoes cameo.

As in 1992's Tom and Jerry: The Movie, we're quickly introduced to a woman in a jam. Moretz is a gig economy grifter who befriends Tom and cheats her way into a temporary job at a hotel preparing to host a high-profile wedding. She works for Peña and Rob Delaney to make sure everything runs smoothly for the event, which means getting rid of Jerry, who decides to take up residence in the hotel just as the wealthy couple begin their stay. Jerry's trying to live rent-free in the hotel and steal the bride's diamond ring, Moretz is trying to get rid of Jerry because he's a rascally troublemaker and Tom is trying to get rid of Jerry because Jerry's an abject jerk who's already beaten him and destroyed his only possession. This is a feature-length film, so Tom and Jerry team-up two-thirds of the way through and take on the real bad guy, which is big of Tom; in the times my head has been caved in by a hammer, I've rarely befriended my attacker later that same day.

There are a lot of things in Tom and Jerry that have the cadence of jokes, but don't actually have punchlines. A fish (making a cameo from the old short "Jerry and the Goldfish") will communicate via poop emoji, Peña will say Drake's name and then call social media "instabookface." I can't judge it, though. Kids love this stuff. I am in no way the target audience for a moment when Spike the dog has diarrhea on the street and Michael Peña yells "How many burritos did you eat?" before cleaning it all up. I don't know if I would have found that funny as a kid. I do know that I loved Rube Goldberg machines, and an especially elaborate one shows up in Tom and Jerry.

The best moments are like that, translating cartoon logic into the real world. Jerry will move a tiny door along a wall so that Tom can't get to it or a bunch of characters will be sucked into a dustball fistfight. As much as I don't want to watch Spike maliciously poop to torture the actor clearly trying his hardest, I'll wince through a few of those moments if you give me Tom being launched through a perfectly Tom-shaped hole in a window.

There probably isn't enough of that. Moretz does what she can with her part, but there just isn't much there. Peña, already cartoonish in so many of his other movie roles, is both more magnetic and consistently side-lined. It's kinetic and fun when Peña chases Tom, who's already chasing Jerry, but those scenes are pushed apart by long sequences where Moretz develops relationships with other staff and helps Colin Jost see that the perfect wedding was in his heart the whole time.

It'll be interesting to see where Warner Bros. goes with these characters from here. The HBO Max series may be the future. This film may be the first release in a new decade of low-budget features. Whatever happens, and it's pretty much all happened to Tom and Jerry, the formula will hold. Tom and Jerry isn't great, but you can set your clock by it. It exists because things like this exist.