Movie Review
Popular kids book bursts to life in film adaptation of Dog Man
Dog Man (Peter Hastings) in Dog Man
There are likely few modern children’s authors more successful than Dav Pilkey. With a career dating back more than 30 years, he cemented his legacy with his 12-book Captain Underpants series, which he started in 1997. Almost 20 years later he became even bigger when he came up with the Dog Man series, which is now at 13 books and counting (not including spin-offs).
Just like Captain Underpants, which came to the big screen in 2017, he’s now unleashed Dog Man for the enjoyment of kids everywhere. The story centers on a hybrid police officer who is created when a cop and his pet dog get into an accident, with the doctors only able to save the dog’s head and the man’s body. The resulting Frankenstein’s monster-like creation can’t speak, but he remains great at his job.
That’s good because Petey the Cat (voiced by Pete Davidson) is on the loose, threatening the city with increasingly outrageous inventions. The Chief (Lil Rel Howery) is alternately impressed and exasperated by Dog Man’s ability to thwart Petey, while reporter Sarah Hatoff (Isla Fisher) is somehow able to be present at every crime scene. When Flippy the psychokinetic fish (Ricky Gervais) and Li’l Petey (Lucas Hopkins Calderon), a clone of Petey, join the fray, the story really starts to amp up.
Written and directed by Peter Hastings (who also provided the “voice” of Dog Man), the film has the look and feel of Pilkey’s series while still allowing for dynamism that the CGI animation brings to the table. The pace of the film is frenetic almost from the get-go, as Hastings rolls out the basics of the story that kids already know by heart. Pilkey has long said that having ADHD is where his creativity started (one of Petey’s robot creations is called, hilariously, 80-HD), and the film seems custom-designed for anyone with limited attention spans, as it moves speedily from one scene to another.
The tone of film, like the books, is very silly, with little attention paid to things like narrative coherence. That’s not a dig; it’s merely to say that the filmmakers are not trying to tell some grand story. Instead, they’re focused on the fun and weird creations that came out of Pilkey’s mind, from the aforementioned characters to the crude-but-effective animation style to things like “living spray” that allow inanimate objects to come to life.
Like the rest of the film, the voice acting is heightened to up the entertainment factor. Davidson doesn’t initially seem like a natural choice for the “villain” of the film, but by the end he makes perfect sense. Howery and Fisher give good performances, and there’s just something about hearing Gervais’ voice come out of an evil mechanical fish’s mouth that seems right.
Unlike some other animated movies, Dog Man doesn’t have a lot of entry points for anyone over the age of, say, 14, but every movie doesn’t have to be for every age group. In fact, the immaturity of the film and its content is precisely what makes it a success and highly watchable for anyone who’s grown up on the book series.
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Dog Man opens in theaters on January 31.
