With turns from Ferrell and Jamie Foxx, this barking stoner caper follows a neglected animal plotting revenge on a beastly owner
he cute talking pigs of the Babe films taught audiences to love real animals with CGI human-talking mouths; I myself was always agnostic, finding them lacking in both the unadorned charm of live-action animals and the complete ingenuity of animations. But this brutally funny stoner comedy about four pottymouthed stray dogs on an incredible quest has changed my mind. You’ll believe a dog can talk – and be extremely abusive.
Writer-producer Dan Perrault, known chiefly for his true-crime docu-spoof American Vandal, and director, Josh Greenbaum, have created a cheerfully offensive comedy about stray dogs trekking across America, with their own issues around abuse, abandonment and emotional PTSD, as well as who to hump and when.
Will Ferrell voices Reggie, a sweetly optimistic little border terrier who doesn’t understand he is being abused by his owner, Doug , a shiftless pothead who has grown to hate Reggie interrupting him while he is trying to masturbate.
Reggie’s new canine compadres radicalise him, showing him how he has absorbed and normalised the cruelty of his human owner, how being a “stray” should be a badge of honour and how he must rise up against the humans. The scales fall from Reggie’s eyes and he is galvanised by a passionate new mission: to find his master and bite his penis off. His three friends follow, perhaps assuming their new friend will learn a life lesson in self-respect and rise above all the violence.
It is an entirely outrageous film with a lot of bad-taste laughs along the way, and a bizarrely real dramatic impact when Reggie finally confronts Doug in the horrendous finale. This is a film that fiercely disrespects Marley and Me and, in a rare example of magnanimity and restraint, doesn’t attack the movie Cats. Homo sapiens get some rough treatment. In the immortal words of Snoop Dogg, who inevitably features on the soundtrack: “It’s a crazy, mixed-up world / It’s a Doggy Dogg world.
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