Mark Reviews Movies: DOG DAYS

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 7, 2018

The characters in Dog Days are so obsessed with their canine pals that the movie borders on parody. When a character here isn't defining his or her life by a pooch, the movie does the obsessing for that character.

These characters have lives beyond their pets, to be sure, but dogs are tied into every fiber of those lives. One woman even sees a therapist for dogs, convinced that her beloved pet is depressed after her boyfriend dumped her. She's talking about the dog's apparent feelings of depression and abandonment, but the subtext, of course, is that she's talking about herself.

This is a comedy, to the extent that there are jokes such as that one here. Those jokes are always obvious, and beneath the superficial surfaces of about half a dozen stories about people whose lives are connected by and revolve around dogs, this is a movie that takes itself quite seriously. Dogs are fine—sometimes great, even. They're no foundation for a movie that's supposed to be about the romances, grieving, and other trying times of human beings, though.

There is a variety of stories here. Well, there's a variety to the extent that two of them are romantic comedies about two mismatched people who gradually learn that they can't do without each other, while the others include a guy who needs to—and eventually does—get his life together, an old man who's still grieving the death of his wife and the teenage boy who helps him find a new lease on life, and a married couple who have adopted a young girl. Their connection is that they all live in Los Angeles and really like dogs, while most of them end up at a fundraising event for a local dog shelter near the end of the movie, when every problem—no matter how significant or trivial—is resolved with the help of a dog.

Parts of the movie are insufferably sappy. A lesser portion of it is tolerably predictable. Some of it is downright odd, and at least one performance is good enough that you almost wish director Ken Marino had scrapped the rest of Elissa Matsueda and Erica Oyama's screenplay, in order to concentrate on the one character who seems to exist outside of some pre-destined formula.

The two romantic-comedy plots involve Elizabeth (Nina Dobrev), the control-freak host of a morning news show, and Tara (Vanessa Hudgens), who works at a local coffee shop. Elizabeth catches her boyfriend having an affair in their apartment, leading her dog—and, naturally, herself, even if she won't admit it—to enter a funk. She's later annoyed and then swept off her feet by her new co-host Jimmy (Tone Bell), a former professional football player whose longest relationship has been with his dog.

Tara, meanwhile, is love-struck by the veterinarian (played by Michael Cassidy) whose office is across the street from the coffee place. Equally smitten with Tara, though, is Garrett (Jon Bass), who runs a nearby dog rescue. After finding a stray Chihuahua and bringing it to the shelter, Tara starts volunteering there, hoping to closer to the vet, while Garrett stares at her with the sad eyes of one of his waiting-to-be-adopted puppies.

Meanwhile, the lazy Dax (Adam Pally) has to watch the shaggy dog of his sister (played by Jessica St. Clair) while she becomes accustomed to motherhood, and Grace (Eva Longoria) and Kurt (Rob Corddry) try too hard to be good parents to Amelia (Elizabeth Phoenix Caro), their newly adopted daughter. There's a dog in that story, too, of course. It's a chubby pug that originally belongs to Walter (Ron Cephas Jones), a widower, but it runs away, only to be found by Amelia. Tyler (Finn Wolfhard), Walter's regular pizza delivery boy, decides to help the old man find his pet.

There are so many stories here, and save for the one that at least gives us Jones' genuinely affecting performance (Walter's inevitable reunion with the dog is quite touching—and not quite in the way we expect), not a single one of them rings true. They're built on cliché after cliché, on sappy moment after sappy moment, and on close-ups of the assorted dogs reacting to the humans as they go along their pre-ordained ways.

Along the way, there's the tired joke involving a drug-laced baked good (which a dog accidentally eats), and there's a really weird running gag that involves Tara's mounting suspicion that her neighbor Dax is a violent kidnapper. Dog Days is an unwelcome, awkward, and uncomfortably lengthy hug of a movie.

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