MOVIE REVIEW: Show Dogs

Animal comedy.Â Max, the toughest dog in the NYPD is hunting down the smugglers of rare animals into America, he’s a streetwise Rottweiler, and will bring the bad guys in no matter what the cost.Â He doesn’t need friends, so when he’s tied to a FBI agent to enter a Dog Show in Las Vegas.

I usually don’t like animal movies.Â Dog movies in particular are high on my level of avoidance, I was burned badly by Turner and Hooch, and don’t get me started on Old Yeller.Â It has to do with my love of dogs, big dogs mostly, and also the over use of sentimentality and the threat of violence against the puppies.Â Do you know how, and this may be just my partner, but the way she looks at shoes is how I look at puppies.Â If it weren’t for her allergy to dog hair I’d have a big puppy or three running through the house, in fact I’ve told her that if we ever fall out of love I’m sneaking in twelve Newfoundland pups and putting an end to this.

Anyway I got the invite to see Show Dogs and the poster is all about the puppies, but we were close to our anniversary and I’m cheap, there were two tickets, so it was an early anniversary trip.Â The best way that I can describe this film is that it is Miss Congeniality with a far cuter star in the lead role.Â Max is voiced by Ludacris and the voice work is pretty amazing, not just from this character, but with Alan Cumming, Stanley Tucci, Ru Paul, and Gabriel Iglesias filling out the voices of the dogs there was some great performances.Â The puppies were cute.Â The human performers were good too as let’s face it it’s hard for Will Arnett to be bad in a comedic role, while American Pie’s Natasha Lyonne is the dedicated Dog Groomer/Handler.

Now we got to see this film with a group of kids and dogs, and both were well-behaved throughout the running time, which is a good sign.Â Usually if you go to one of these kid friendly screenings and they are finding it hard to be entertained by the film they get up and run around, but if they are having a good time they sit there and watch the movie.Â This says a lot for Show Dogs in my mind.

The film isn’t perfect, at times there are moments of comedic gold, reminding me of the better Jerry Lewis movies, while at other times the jokes are so lame that you question sitting there.Â I laughed steadily, didn’t bust a guy or anything, but was entertained.Â The big problem I found is that the film seemed to not know where it wanted to go at points, a dedicated kids film, but then we turn a corner and there are jokes that adults would only understand.Â So that split personality in the film was a little off-putting.

There is little new here, we’ve probably had this film before in different guises, but I laughed and in that it’s worth going back to watch again.Â If you’ve got under 10 year olds in your family this is a great way to spend an hour and a half.Â Far from Pawful but could have been Pawsome!

[yasr_overall_rating size=”large”]