Sappy factor weighs down puppy tale

A Dog’s Purpose

(out of 4) Starring Josh Gad (voice) and Dennis Quaid. Directed by Lasse Hallstrom. Opens Friday. 120 minutes. PG A Dog’s Purpose opens with a shot of a newborn litter of puppies, which made the audience at a recent screening gasp. You don’t have to be a dog person to get the lowest-hanging fruit ripening on your heartstrings tugged by the lovability of the animals in this mild drama.

Director Lasse Hallstrom ( Chocolat, The Hundred-Foot Journey) successfully captures the wild soul of man’s best friend as the animals assuredly walk away with the movie, about an eternal dog spirit (voiced by Josh Gad, known as the voice of the snowman Olaf in Frozen) that is reincarnated through a lineage of American dogs from the ’60s through present day.

The most emphasis is placed on his life as Bailey, a retriever, and the coming-of-age of his owner Ethan. The film’s marketing team was smart to make the poster for A Dog’s Purpose just a giant photograph of this dog’s face as if he were Jennifer Lawrence. The dog really does have that much star power.

Of course, what had originally been marketed as “the first feel-great film of the year” has become an unlikely contender for the first controversial film of the year after a video leaked from the Manitoba set showing a German shepherd fighting against being thrown into a pool.

That scene, in which our canine protagonist rescues a drowning girl, is the only time one of the dogs — soaking wet and paddling through the current — looks uncomfortable. Most of what we see onscreen is a lot of dogs playing catch, licking faces and loving life.

Still, those slobbery faces can’t save a story that relies on a repetitive narrative structure, is populated with broadly drawn characters and has poor Josh Gad delivering lines such as, “I smelled . . . me!”

The Dog Spirit also has an unsettling fixation on playing canine cupid to its progression of single-people owners. Can’t this dog just let them live? This film makes the case that there could be a great movie that uses dogs as a lens on life as a human (maybe an adaptation of Andre Alexis’s novel Fifteen Dogs?). This just isn’t it.

When Hollywood casts a dog as the lead in a movie, it’s pretty much always because there is a sappily inspirational tale to be told.

And that, as they say, is A Dog’s Purpose.