Mark Reviews Movies: A DOG'S JOURNEY

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 16, 2019

It's really not fair that A Dog's Journey affected me as much as it did. The movie itself continues the manipulative, contrived plotting of its predecessor. That one was called A Dog's Purpose, and whether or not the soul of a repeatedly reincarnated pup actually discovered its purpose is a detail long forgotten—even though that movie only came out two years ago. The soul does discover the meaning of its multiple lives here, in a final sequence that felt like a targeted, very personal assault on my tear ducts.

The basic premise of the sequel continues the approach of the previous movie. Here, the wandering soul (voiced by Josh Gad) keeps finding itself in the body of a new dog. This, of course, is because dogs die—a fact of which the movie keeps reminding us for no other reason except to try to make us cry. Just as in the last movie, multiple dogs die in assorted and depressing ways here. Since we already know the game of this story, it's much easier to become numb to it—until the ending, that is, although, admittedly, results may vary on that front.

To be fair, though, there are certain things that this movie, adapted from W. Bruce Cameron's book by four screenwriters (Maya Forbes, Cathryn Michon, Wallace Wolodarsky, and the author himself), does better than its predecessor. For one thing, the story of the soul's constant movement actually has a clear purpose, connected to the lives of the human characters who eventually became the central focal point of the first movie's tale. It doesn't seem like some random series of stories, connected only by loneliness and how a dog's presence can help that.

This time around, it's all about Ethan (Dennis Quaid), the man whose childhood dog returned to him in a different dog's body by the end of the previous movie, and his family. Specifically, it's about Ethan's granddaughter, whose first few years of life are spent at Ethan and his wife Hannah's (Marg Helgenberger) farm after the untimely death of the girl's father.

The girl is CJ, played by Abby Ryder Fortson as a youngster, who adopts the newest reincarnation of her grandfather's dog, and by Kathryn Prescott for the remainder of the story. As you probably figure out at this point, Ethan's dog dies yet again (and again and again, etc.), which seems particularly mean after going through the constant deaths in the first movie. It felt like a simple mercy that we didn't see the reincarnated Bailey, finally reunited with the owner who loved the dog so dearly, die at the end of the last story. Now, we get that unavoidable scene, just so we can watch it happen to various dogs again and again, etc.

As the dog dies, Ethan asks it to look after CJ, who has been taken from the farm by her mother Gloria (Betty Gilpin), who's presented as a caricature of the worst-possible mother to ever exist. Years later, the dog's soul enters a newborn beagle named Molly, and lo and behold, CJ just happens to adopt it.

There are many, many oddities that follow. One is Molly learning to smell the early signs of cancer, which might as well be announcing that some character here will have cancer. There are a couple of subplots about CJ's terrible relationships with a couple of terrible men, including an attempted murder involving a car chase that results in Molly's death (and, also, absolutely no consequences, because this movie is mostly about how sad dogs dying, not human lives, can be).

The soul becomes two other dogs by the end of the story—one, a big dog that briefly encounters CJ at a gas station before going off into the woods to die alone, and the other, a Yorkshire Terrier that is again adopted by CJ. By this point, CJ is stalling in trying to become a singer-songwriter, has another terrible boyfriend, and reunites with Trent (Henry Lau), who was her best friend as a child.

Everything else is predictable, save, perhaps, for a scene in which Gloria returns. During it, we might start to think that the movie cares even a little bit about its human characters as more than pawns in some weird, cosmic series of coincidences and melodrama, seen from the perspective of a dog who inserts some ill-timed jokes about poop at inopportune times. Thinking that would be a mistake, because it should come as absolutely no surprise that the movie gets CJ—and, much more importantly, the dog—back to Ethan's farm.

This is not a good movie. It's cloying and sappy, built around a bunch of human drama that only matters because there's a dog that will inevitably die in it. All of this remains the case, yet there's still that little issue of the ending of A Dog's Journey, which did impact me in a surprising but, under the circumstances of what happens, expected way. Without going into too much personal detail, what can be said is that the movie's final imagery—of a man again and finally reunited with his dog—is, truly, a lovely thought.

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