Starring: Tom and Jerry, Chloë Grace Moretz, Michael Peña. Colin Jost, Rob Delaney, Ken Jeong

Directed by Tim Story

Warner Bros. out now (US)

The eternal battle of cat and mouse plays out against the backdrop of a major wedding…

It’s easy to screw up a Tom & Jerry movie, as has been proved countless times over the years where efforts have been made to force the characters into situations to suit the plot, forgetting the core appeal of the pair is the constant battle and turning of the tables between the two of them. Tim Story’s movie keeps that at its heart with some brilliant sequences featuring the pair that will have you reacting as you would have done as a kid (my favourite being Tom’s attempts to get into Jerry’s hotel room, which gives us a Bat-riff I wasn’t quite expecting). True, the plot requires them to work together for a time, but even then it’s far more of a truce, a brief cessation of hostilities in the face of a greater danger, than anything else.

Story’s genius in this is to present all non-humans in cartoon form – Tom and Jerry themselves are hand-drawn and therefore resemble their previous incarnations far more than they’ve usually done in recent times. And even more importantly, Tom and Jerry themselves don’t speak. They communicate without a problem, and Tom’s devil and angelic selves are able to wrangle vocally, but Christopher Lennertz homages Scott Bradley’s scores for the original shorts with musical “speech”.

The humans involved all play it absolutely straight, and we’re definitely in Roger Rabbit territory for the amount of interaction between humans and animals – if Chloë Grace Moretz in particular didn’t sell this well enough, the movie would collapse. Instead, there are sight gags, farcical situations and just the right level of pathos to keep the plot moving.

Verdict: It’s never going to trouble the Oscars, but if you’re looking for 100 minutes of daft, animated fun, call for Tom & Jerry. 7/10 (more if you’re chronologically or feeling aged under 10!)

Paul Simpson