Who’s a good dog?
As A Dog’s Journey hits theatres, we take a walk with some of our all-time favourite movie mutts. A review appears on
A Dog’s Journey
★★ 1/2 out of 5
Cast: Josh Gad,
Dennis Quaid, Kathryn Prescott
Director: Gail Mancuso
Duration: 1 h 48 m Not to be outdone by Avengers: Endgame, the A Dog’s Purpose extended universe adds four new reincarnated pups to the pack in the unimaginatively titled sequel A Dog’s Journey, a tear-jerking machine that’s about as effective as it is shameless.
The film follows the hit adaptation of W. Bruce Cameron’s lightly Buddhist tear-jerker about a dog who reincarnates himself over and over again until he finds his way back to his owner Ethan (Dennis Quaid). Mostly for the better, the sequel takes a more linear path than its predecessor by following its hero Bailey — or is that Molly, Max or Toby? — as he looks after a new generation of Ethan’s family in spite of the ravages of time and the indignities of mortality; little hurdles like death by old age, as well as by an entirely preventable, grotesque accident.
Despite PETA’s boycott of the first film over the apparent mistreatment of the canine co-stars, Josh Gad returns to distractedly Skype in his voice-overs as the endlessly re-spawning pup with many names and one cool trick involving a deflated football and a gravity-defying jump off Ethan’s back. This time Bailey’s purpose, given to him by Ethan on his death bed in an odd scene that edges into Pet Sematary territory, involves taking care of his old master’s granddaughter C.J. (played at different ages by Ant-Man’s Abby Ryder Fortson and Skins star Kathryn Prescott) after her alcoholic single mom (Betty Gilpin from Glow) takes her away from the family farm.
Though you’d hardly call anything in this family melodrama radical, there’s an odd tension between the film’s supernatural conceit and its proudly pedestrian execution. The latter is thanks mostly to director Gail Mancuso, who picks up the leash from Lasse Hallström, who was seemingly fated to direct the original after breaking out in North America with 1985’s Swedish art house hit My Life as a Dog (which, for the record, is not about a dog). Hallström’s paw-haunted career has the kind of kismet this movie could use. Instead, working from a choppy script by Cameron, comic Cathryn Michon and husband and wife team Wally Wolodarsky and Maya Forbes, the TV sitcom veteran hits all her marks with bland competence and visual sterility.
That’s to say that everything looks a little too golden for a movie whose hero dies and comes back as many times as Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, and in a new body each time, no less. The filmmaking does its best to dull the magic and abruptly stop any existential questions poor Bailey might be feeling after his umpteenth regeneration. Even Doctor Who’s titular Time Lord has a bit of post-traumatic reincarnation stress from time to time, but Bailey — a shockingly well-adjusted boy even when he’s a girl — seems blissfully uninterested in his predicament, accepting Ethan’s commandment to AirPlay his consciousness into an endless supply of newborn puppies.
It’s to Prescott’s and Quaid’s credit as likable and earnest performers that moments of human warmth emerge in this otherwise slick and cynical last act.
Most of the emotional heavy lifting, though, goes to the cruel and quixotic nature of life itself. The film’s commitment to doing the absolute bare minimum turns out to be a shrewd choice, if the open sobs at the press screening (only some of them mine) are anything to go by. Pet owners are always going to be eager to find some purpose in the unfairly short, miraculous, cherished lives of their very good boys and girls, and movies like A Dog’s Journey will always be happy to supply them. You just wish they didn’t spend so much time at obedience school.