1.5/5 stars This live action/animated update of the famed television cartoon series Tom & Jerry fails on all levels, featuring nothing to interest kids, their guardians, or animation buffs. Bewilderingly, the combative cat-and-mouse team are reduced to bit-part players in their own film, which mainly focuses on the efforts of a resourceful hotel concierge (played by Chloë Grace Moretz) to ensure that a rich couple’s wedding party goes smoothly. The action sequences featuring Tom and Jerry, which are scattered throughout the slimmest of storylines, do manage to reflect the crazy antics of the original, which continuously showed Tom being splattered on windows and doors, and bashed with household objects, while pursuing the crafty mouse Jerry. Their personalities survive intact, too, and they are not forced to speak as they were in the similarly disastrous 1992 attempt to elevate the duo to feature film status. But there’s simply not enough good bits to sustain a full-length film. Tom & Jerry , the original series, is one of the pillars of Western animation. Produced for the MGM studio, it was the first series to be created by William Hanna and Joseph Barbera, the team who later created enduring classics like The Flintstones , Yogi Bear , and Scooby Doo . The focus of the Tom & Jerry TV series is frantic motion, and the characters race around the screen at high speed, bashing into objects at every turn. The story is simple – that cat chases the mouse. The animation was groundbreaking at the time, and it’s still an influence on animators today. The same can’t be said of the new film. The way the live action is combined with the animated scenes is horribly mismatched, and the result often looks like two separate films have been mashed together. The scenes featuring only the cartoon characters have fully animated backgrounds, while the scenes with actors and cartoons have real backdrops. This means that the screen is constantly lurching between the two forms. The plot is also a dud. Tom and Jerry have relocated to New York, where Jerry moves into a hotel and Tom is hired by a street-smart concierge to catch him. Realising that there’s not enough going on for a full-length story, the producers give the live-action plot about a society wedding equal weight. The story doesn’t even make sense on its own terms, as many of the other animated characters speak, but Tom and Jerry are mute. Jerry himself set the standard for live-action/animated films when he appeared in Anchors Aweigh in 1945, tap-dancing with Gene Kelly in a scene of animated brilliance. The legendary cat and mouse team deserve better than this unimaginative rehash. Want more articles like this? Follow SCMP Film on Facebook