DOGMAN (2024) - Mark Reviews Movies

DogMan, Briarcliff Entertainment

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Review by Mark Dujsik | March 28, 2024

There's probably a sincere movie to be made from the story of DogMan, which follows an abused boy through a life of struggle, only made better by helping others, performing on stage, and his relationship with a large group of stray dogs. Right off the bat, though, writer/director Luc Besson presents this material as something of an oddity.

We first meet Doug (Caleb Landry Jones), known as "the Dogman" for his almost magical relationship with canines, being pulled over by the cops. He's bruised, bloodied, and, for reasons that sort of become clear around the halfway point of this back-and-forth narrative, dressed in drag. That Besson keeps Doug's face from us upon his introduction clearly means the filmmaker wants this revelation to be something of a surprise or a shock, and even something as that simple choice puts a kind of distance between us and the protagonist, while also suggesting that this character isn't a person but a strange mystery to be solved.

It would be unfair to state that this is Besson's intention, especially since the central mystery here is in learning about Doug horrific past, the struggles he has endured through his life, and how he has turned the origin of that pain into something beneficial for himself and others. Presumably, this is meant to a tale of compassion, but it's difficult to accept that motive as genuine when the material itself is presented in such an over-the-top, ultimately violent, and ineffectively campy way.

The framing story sees Doug in jail, after being arrested for an unspecified crime while driving a truck full of dogs. A psychiatrist named Evelyn (Jojo T. Gibbs), who also has abuse in her childhood and recent pasts, is called in to analyze him, and from there, we get the full extent of Doug's life story, mostly told chronologically but with a quick hook at the start that sets up the flashbacks' action-oriented climax. Again, a simple but notable storytelling decision lets us see through whatever airs of understanding Besson might attempt to put on here.

Doug's back story begins with his childhood, as the younger son to abusive father (played by Clemens Schick)—a man who, as Doug tells it, hated everything about life starting with himself. The father raised dogs for fights, and after the older brother (played by Alexander Settineri) told their father that Doug was feeding the starving animals, Doug is locked up in the kennel with the dogs. His rescue comes when Doug tells one of the dogs to bring the finger his father shot off to the police.

Yes, Doug, who is also left mostly paralyzed from the waist down by the gunshot, can speak to and be understood by dogs. In a less severe story, this might serve as an amusing, intriguing hook for a thriller, but in case the rampant abuse and talk about theology and melodrama about Doug having his heart broken by the love of his life don't make it clear, Besson's intentions aren't so simplistic.

His approach to the story is, of course, because the material is played as generally weird and builds toward a climax that sees Doug and his dogs defending his hideout from a siege by a local gang. Of all the tones and routes this story could have taken, the filmmaker has chosen one that almost makes the entire endeavor feel like an elaborate prank. It puts forth a lot of issues involving the psychological fallout of abuse, questions of identity, debates about economic inequality, and grand thoughts about some divine presence in the world, but the method is so ridiculous and seemingly random that it's impossible to take any of it too seriously.

The parts we can, perhaps, have to do with Jones' performance, which somehow finds some core of ache and absolute vulnerability to a character whose every element feels like a gimmick. After being rescued from his father, Doug finds comfort and meaning in theater, before his mentor Salma (Grace Palma) becomes famous and reveals she's married when Doug (who has been following her life, except for this one vital thing, somehow) reunites with her years later. Following the heartbreak, Doug becomes dependent on helping dogs in a local shelter, teaches them to steal from the rich, uses them to intimidate a ruthless gang leader, and starts performing one night a week in a drag show.

If it sounds odd, Besson makes it even stranger by throwing all of this at us as a string of events without any human grounding beyond the basic notion of trauma and the skills of his lead actor. DogMan is a mishmash of ideas and genres taken to such melodramatic heights that its fall is inevitable.

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