Garfield: The Movie Starring Breckin Meyer, Jennifer Love Hewitt, and the voice of Bill Murray. Directed by Pete Hewitt. Written by Joel Cohen and Alec Sokolow, based on Jim Davis' comic strip. Rated PG.

When the movie Ghostbusters was made into a cartoon tv series, the late Lorenzo Music took over the part played by Bill Murray and provided his voice. Music was more famous, though, for doing the voice of Garfield in a number of half-hour tv specials in the 1980s, when Jim Davis' lasagna-loving comic-strip creation was at the crest of his popularity. Now, the fat orange cat is starring in his own movie, and Murray has stepped in for Music and taken over the voice.

That little bit of symmetry is unfortunately more interesting than anything that happens in Garfield: The Movie, which stars a computer-animated cat interacting with real people. That turns out to be the movie's first mistake; Hollywood's been trying to integrate human actors and cartoon characters ever since the success of Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, but whether it's Stuart Little or Scooby-Doo, the trick almost never comes off. The CGI rendering of the cat isn't funny, and the ÒstarÓ is continually upstaged by the real trained dog used to portray Garfield's housemate Odie. Would it have been that much harder to train a real cat than to create one through animation?

Then again, a real cat wouldn't have made much difference in view of the movie's substandard material. (It doesn't help that Garfield's first line, ÒI hate Mondays,Ó is also spoken by the much funnier animated cat in Shrek 2.) Garfield winds up in a dreary plot involving Odie being abducted by a local celebrity (Stephen Tobolowsky) looking for a dog act. The only time this movie ever catches a whiff of inspiration is when Garfield is kicked out of the house and responds by bursting into a wobbly modified version of Billy Joel's ÒNew York State of Mind.Ó It's nice, but it doesn't begin to cover for the many tired jokes and routines on display here. None of the humans on the set step up to bail out the script, either. Breckin Meyer cruises on auto-pilot as Garfield's hapless owner Jon, while Jennifer Love Hewitt does her usual perky shtick as a pretty veterinarian. The unrelated director Pete Hewitt, who has done some good work with kids' movies in the past (The Borrowers), films without momentum or urgency.

As for Murray, well, the guy with better taste in projects than any other comic actor of his generation hasn't been immune to appearing in the occasional stinker, but even in those he has tended to at least do something interesting (Charlie's Angels). He adds surprisingly little to this film, but not to worry. With roles in Jim Jarmusch's Coffee and Cigarettes (now currently playing in Dallas) and Wes Anderson's upcoming film The Life Aquatic, it's safe to predict that in six months, Garfield: The Movie will be a tiny orange blot on his sterling record.