Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties (2006)

See how they conceive evil,
and are pregnant with mischief,
and bring forth lies.
They make a pit, digging it out,
and fall into the hole that they have made.
Their mischief returns upon their own heads,
and on their own heads their violence descends.
Psalm 7:14-16

Although I have not seen our paunchy cat quote the Psalms in any of the strips that adorn our newspaper pages, this amusing film could serve as a midrash for the above passage. The title might make you think of Dickens, but the story is closer to Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper. Without going into too many details of the plot, our saucy-tongued feline friend (perfectly voiced by Bill Murray) finds himself in England with the human whom he owns, Jon Arbuckle (Breckin Meyer), who has followed across the Atlantic the love of his heart Liz Wilson (Jennifer Love Hewitt) in order to propose to her. On a large estate lives in palatial splendor the second “kittie” of the title, Prince. He is left the estate by the recently deceased human whom he had owned, but the next in line, Lord Dargis (Billy Connolly), plots to cut short Prince’s reign.

All the shenanigans are funnier in this sequel, a film that will remind adults not only of Mark Twain’s classic when the two kitties change places for a hilarious series of events, but also bring back pleasant memories of those old Chuck Jones’ cartoons in which various villains always wind up victims of their own nefarious plots to do in someone else—only Garfield is far more sophisticatedly sarcastic than any of the innocents of the vintage cartoons.