Mark Reviews Movies: DOG

Dog, United Artists Releasing

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Review by Mark Dujsik | February 17, 2022

Dog isn't a sneaky film, since its more serious intentions are apparent throughout, but its emotional impact certainly does sneak up on you. The broad comedy and familiar, high-concept plot are definitely stumbling blocks for co-directors Reid Carolin, who also wrote screenplay, and Channing Tatum, who also stars—with both making their directorial debuts. When the filmmakers allow the wounded heart beneath the gimmicky fluff to be fully exposed, though, it's much easier to forgive how—and, to a certain extent, understand why—this film goes out of its way to deflect from what's really happening in this story.

To be fair, that reality is pretty obvious from the start. We meet Briggs (Tatum), an Army Ranger veteran who has been discharged from service following a traumatic brain injury. He lives alone and with a pretty significant chip on his shoulder, since everyone else in his unit either is still in the military or has moved on to some lucrative career in the private sector. Briggs makes sandwiches at a local chain deli and has to take pills to keep debilitating headaches, as well as seizures, at bay.

He's a mess, and while—and probably because—he doesn't speak of it, his problems are deeper than his body, which carries all sorts of scars from bullet wounds and shrapnel injuries. All of this matters to the story, even if it does seem to stick to the background for a while, and Carolin's screenplay is smart in the way it presents Briggs' assorted issues gradually and naturally, before confronting them directly by the film's end.

In case we miss it, though, the eponymous animal serves as a pretty overt reflection of what Briggs is experiencing and cannot—or will not—put into words. The dog is Lulu, played by a cute and rather expressive Belgian Malinois (The temptation to suggest or outright say that an animal gives a great performance is pretty strong here), a scouting and attack canine that now sits muzzled in a cage at a military base. The dog's handler, one of Briggs' Ranger comrades, has died, and the family wants Lulu to travel more than a thousand miles from the base in Washington to the funeral in Arizona. Since the dog won't fly on a plane, Briggs' former commanding officer (played by Luke Forbes) asks Briggs to drive the dog, in exchange for a job recommendation with a security firm.

That setup is pure formula on a few levels: the road-trip comedy, the mismatched partners, and the guy who doesn't particularly care for animals—or, at least, this particular animal—being teamed up with a rather troublesome one. Lulu is a pain for Briggs—pawing at or breaking free of the travel crate, ripping up his truck's upholstery, barking whenever he's out of sight, running off at any chance. Briggs isn't much of a help, either, since he has other things, such as trying to meet women at local bars along the way, on his mind, and he's impatient with and angry at the dog because it won't behave as he wants it to.

Most of this lighter material is slight and predictable, and some of it comes across as awkwardly forced, especially in terms of the story's bigger comedic setpieces. There's the odd scene in which Briggs tries to sleep with a pair of two New Age women (played by Emmy Raver-Lampman and Nicole LaLiberte), only for them to focus on his scars, while Lulu is "rescued" by an unaware hippie type. There's the really strange scene in which Briggs is drugged and tied up by a marijuana farmer (played by Kevin Nash), whose wife (played by Jane Adams) later does a psychic reading for Lulu. That leads to yet another uncomfortably strained sequence in which Briggs pretends to be blind, in order get a free room at a fancy San Francisco hotel, only for Lulu's training to kick in when a man of Middle Eastern descent walks through the lobby.

The episodic misadventures of this unlikely pair don't work, although some details—that Briggs was ready to kill his hapless abductor and is the kind of guy who would pretend to be blind—do fit into the more important aspect of what the filmmakers are doing here. Some quieter scenes, such as Briggs having suicidal ideations but passing them off as a joke, are far more direct about Briggs and his deeper, unaddressed issues. Throughout, Tatum's performance is admirable in the way he embraces the underlying pain and trauma, the questionable behavior, and the easygoing charm of the character, not to be likeable, but to be honest—in sometimes troubling ways.

As filmmakers, Carolin and Tatum shift away from the uneasy, unconvincing comedy with a reunion between Briggs and a fellow veteran (played by Ethan Suplee), who has adopted Lulu's brother, another military dog. Matters such as post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, anxiety, and the actual cause of the death of Lulu's handler are spoken about with frankness and compassion, and it helps to re-define and re-orient a few things about Briggs, Lulu, their relationship and similarities, and the entire scheme of the plot in ways that are surprisingly sensitive and affecting.

There are plenty of reasons this shouldn't work, and for a bit, the film doesn't find a way to meld its rough comedy and its far more serious, precise elements of character study. In eventually abandoning the former and focusing the latter, Dog finally, directly, and effectively tells the story it has been trying to tell the entire time.

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