A Dog’s Way Home (2019)
Directed by Charles Martin Smith
Viewed in Theatre

Summary: As saccharine and familiar as I expected, though the scene where Bella, the dog, winds up chained to a dying homeless man somewhat surprised me.

Woooo! First theatrical dog movie of 2019! Man, when I saw that there was a January bound dog movie, I jumped for joy and recoiled in terror, especially because this is my first January where I’m operating this blog. Thinking back about A Dog’s Way Home, I almost wish it was a worse movie. Not because it’s good, and why on Earth would you want to hear about a good dog movie, but because most of its sins can be pinned on one of two flaws, with the far more serious of those flaws being just how god damn boring this movie is.

It is so boring, so little happens, that I don’t even need to tell you the plot, you can just tell me the plot, you don’t even have to watch the trailer, all you have to do is read the title. A Dog’s Way Home. A dog gets lost. The dog finds its way home. That’s the plot. Spoiler Alert! Now yes, I am condensing the story a bit, other things do happen, like Bella running into some dogs in a town, Bella meeting a mountain lion kitten (rendered in horrifying CGI) and mothering it, Bella getting temporarily adopted by these two gentlemen who I assume are a gay couple but they aren’t allowed to do anything remotely indicative of that relationship, like holding hands or kissing, and so on. The problem is that even though so many of these things happen, very few things actually matter to the overall story, which is fine for a character-driven comedy like The Big Lebowski, but doesn’t really work when no three-dimensional characters exist.

So I mentioned the flaw of it being boring, but not the other main flaw that A Dog’s Way Home has, which is that it is so sentimental and saccharine and simple that every scene is just schmaltz on schmaltz so that the entire movie feels like one long continuous schmaltz scene. I can boil down the first act to this:

Bella the dog: I am a puppy and I live in an abandoned building with my cat friends and my mom dog. Oh no, mean, bad animal control people are viciously taking these puppies and kittens off the streets so they can be neutered and adopted out, they are such monsters! But it’s fine because I am now being raised by cat mom. Oh look, a person wandered up! Better declare my love for him!

Human: I LOVE YOU BELLA

BELLA: I LOVE YOU HUMAN

HUMAN: I LOVE YOU MORE, ALSO VETERANS ARE ALL REAL AMERICAN HEROES.

BELLA: What?

HUMAN: NOTHING I LOVE YOU.

Just repeat that for about thirty minutes and that is the plot of the first act. Well, there is one more thing, and that is that a greedy no good land developer wants to tear down a block of abandoned buildings and build…something there. But he won’t get animal control to remove the animals that are there! He won’t do that because…he doesn’t like animals? This part doesn’t make any sense, he can easily just call animal control and have them remove the animals, but instead of that, he uses some vague control he has over an animal control agent to declare the zone animal free instead of just getting animal control to do their jobs. Really he’s just being a dick so the plot of Bella being sent away so she can eventually make her way back home can happen.

All these plot elements are so basic and predictable and emotionally simple that this is the cinematic equivalent of holding up cue cards for the audience. Mean man does mean thing “Holds Up Card telling you to be Angry.” Bella is trying to find her way home and experiences hardship, “Holds Up Card To Cry.” Human and Bella have wholesome playtime, “Holds Up Card To Find This Endearing.” A man dies ten feet away from Bella, “Hold Up Card To…Be Sad And Also Confused?”

There’s almost nothing more I can say about A Dog’s Way Home. There’s so little substance here that any attempt I make at dissecting it is just an exercise in frustration. This shouldn’t be in a movie theatre, this should have been a TV movie, maybe a short miniseries, and if it was that then I would never ever talk about it or see it. Oh, I just remembered something, almost all the animals, except Bella, are CGI, and it is mildly noticeable when a real-life dog is nuzzling a CGI mountain lion. I laughed a bit when stuff like that happened, and it happened a fair amount, which felt a bit odd when they were CGIing common animals, like squirrels or cats. I understand that you can’t get a mountain lion for your movie, but you can’t get a squirrel either?

Everything here is just so simple and stupid, every character is either completely good or completely bad and there is no middle ground or complexity anywhere. Why do animal control people in movies always hate animals? It’s their job to work with animals! Why is the dude who wants to tear down the eyesore house ruins, that would be breeding grounds for pests and stray animals, such an asshole, even when not being an asshole would be easier and cheaper? I mean, I know why this is, it’s so we can justify when the heroes do questionable things like; secretly break their lease agreement, assault/threaten animal control agents, bring food to stray animals in an abandoned house so they’ll stay there instead of leaving, that we know, oh, don’t worry they’re still the good guys and the bad guys are still the bad guys. It’s infuriating.

In short, watching A Dog’s Way Home is like eating a full bag of sugar. Sure, the first few tastes might be enjoyable what with the overwhelming sweetness, but as you get further and further down you realize that nothing is going to change and everything becomes this unpleasant gloopy sadness. And then you realize there’s still an hour left of eat-watching. Not complex enough for adults and a bit too grim for children, what with the wolf attack and the aforementioned man who dies. This review is just venting though, because if you really want to see it then you probably already have.

Tags: Dog MoviesMovie Review