Mark Reviews Movies: DAKOTA (2022)

Dakota, Samuel Goldwyn Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | March 31, 2022

There's a potentially heartwarming story at the core of Dakota. It's as simple as a young girl, mourning the death of her father, learning that it's normal, safe, and healthy to love again, and that lesson comes from the late father's dog, which served with him in combat and misses the man, too.

In the wrong hands, such a story could have been irritatingly schmaltzy, and it's almost as if screenwriter Johnny Harrington and director Kirk Harris are scared of falling into that trap. Instead, we get a story about a land battle that just happens to feature a girl and her dog, fading deeper and deeper into the background.

The girl is Alex (Lola Sultan), who lives on a farm in Georgia with her widowed mother Kate (Abbie Cornish, with a questionable Southern drawl but a degree of emotional sincerity that more than compensates for it). They're brought the combat canine—named Dakota, naturally—by CJ (Tim Rozon), who also served with the dad and the dog.

The animal has retired, and despite warnings that bringing the family Dakota goes against protocol (A "promise is a promise" clause apparently exists in the military) and that the dog isn't exactly pet material since it suffers from anxiety, none of that really comes into play here. Neither does Alex's initial hesitation to take Dakota out of fear that the dog will just run away and disappear. The whole relationship between the two is resolved and solidified with a brief montage of them spending time together.

Most of the plot, then, revolves around the villainous Sheriff Danforth (Patrick Muldoon), who wants the farm for reasons that are almost too silly and clichéd to put into words here. Anyway, the nasty Sheriff doesn't like that the family's pesky new dog is getting too close to literally digging up the land's secret, so he tries to catch the pup with a couple of incompetent goons.

Oddly, nobody catches on to his obvious villainy, save for Alex and Dakota, obviously, as well as the girl's paternal grandfather Monty (William Baldwin), who decides to fight back with an iron and a couple of golf balls. The Sheriff, by the way, isn't evil enough to let someone die of a heart attack in front of him, but he is enough of a sociopath to burn a flock of chickens alive, before trying to immolate more animals and, for all he knows, a couple of people, too.

For better or worse, the movie mostly avoids the obvious, such as a seemingly inevitable romance between Kate and CJ, but that's mainly because Harrington's screenplay is so busy with a random, repetitive plot. Yes, Dakota could have been manipulative and mawkish, and honesty, maybe that would have been better.

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