Walkies of life
12A ★★★ In cinemas now
After a five-year break from leading-man duties, hen night organiser Channing Tatum returns with a personal take on the 1989 buddy movie Turner & Hooch.
Dog, which the Magic Mike Live supremo co-directs with Reid Carolin, is loosely based on a final road trip he took with his dying pit bull-catahoula cross Lulu in 2018.
Tatum is US Army Ranger Briggs, hot-tempered, quick-witted and frequently shirtless, who is straining at the leash after being relieved of active duty due to suffering a head injury. To prove he has recovered, his captain tasks him with driving a traumatised and soon-to-beeuthanised Belgian Malinois military mutt called Lulu from an army base in Washington State to a cemetery in Arizona to attend the funeral of her handler.
Unlike Tatum, Briggs isn’t a dog person and after several gruelling tours of duty, Lulu isn’t exactly man’s best friend.
But can the war-scarred pair form a bond during an eventful road trip down the Pacific coast? Only the barking would suspect otherwise.
Their adventures aren’t quite as family friendly as you may expect, including a run-in with a paranoid cannabis farmer and
Lulu interrupting Briggs’s “epic threesome” he’s enjoying with a pair of tantric healers.
The comedy is something of a mixed bag. A sequence where Briggs feigns blindness to blag a room at a posh hotel is pure farce but I wasn’t sure how to take a scene where the pair get caught in a storm. As an emotional Briggs crouches in the rain, you expect him to peel off that wet T-shirt and bust into another tongue-incheek stripping routine.
Thankfully, the pairing is solid with Tatum sparking with the three hairy actors who play Lulu. Fans of sensitive hunks and doleful mutts will lap this one up.
He isn’t a dog person and after tours of duty Lulu isn’t man’s best friend