Tim Hill's family comedies give experienced performers room to be funny, but too often leave them working with weak material. His work on SpongeBob SquarePants suggests a comic appetite that Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties barely satisfies.
Fi1m perspective
Bill Murray supplies dry amusement in Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties (2006), while the film keeps talking around him. Tim Hill has performers who can make a slight line funny, but he does not turn those scattered moments into a comedy worth recommending. The trouble is how readily the film settles for that, leaving us to wait through stretches of chatter.
Hill helped develop SpongeBob SquarePants (1999) with Stephen Hillenburg and Derek Drymon. He wrote the pilot and early episodes and served as story editor. His own account of that work stresses making comedy that amused its makers, without pandering to children. That makes the long waits for a joke in Garfield particularly disappointing.
The move into features began with Muppets from Space (1999), followed by family comedies including Alvin and the Chipmunks (2007) and Hop (2011). These jobs require practical skill, especially when live performers must react to animated characters who are not physically there. Hill's handling of that difficulty in Hop is a strength. With Garfield, we wanted some of that attention spent on giving the characters something funny to do.
In Garfield, Joel Cohen and Alec Sokolow's screenplay gives Hill too many slight lines, though Billy Connolly and Tim Curry help to make them bearable. We were frustrated by the film because Murray and his fellow performers kept finding small laughs in material that would not sustain them. Hill deserves credit for those moments, but at 86 minutes the stretches between usable jokes are hard to excuse. The film needs more comic action, not another exchange of dialogue.
The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge on the Run (2020), which Hill directed and co-wrote, returned him to a series he had helped develop. The War with Grandpa (2020) took him towards generational conflict and pranks in another family comedy. For his next one, we would be more encouraged by a sharper screenplay than by another familiar set of faces.
Biography
Tim Hill is an American film director, screenwriter and television writer. Born Timothy Joseph Hill on 31 May 1958 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, he began his career in the 1990s as a writer and storyboard artist on Rocko's Modern Life. He co-developed SpongeBob SquarePants with Stephen Hillenburg and others, writing the pilot episode and serving as story editor and writer on the series from 1999.
Hill has directed several family films, including Muppets from Space (1999), Max Keeble's Big Move (2001), Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties (2006), Alvin and the Chipmunks (2007), Hop (2011), The War with Grandpa (2020) and The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge on the Run (2020), which he also co-wrote. He is the nephew of director George Roy Hill and has been married to actress Veronica Alicino since 1997.
