Sunday, August 19, 2018

Movie Review: "Dog Days" (2018)

Director: Ken Marino
Year: 2018
Rating: PG
Running Time: 1 hour, 52 minutes

The lives of many different people living in Los Angeles are affected by man's best friend, the dog, in a slew of different ways.



"What is wrong with us?" (Image Source)
We can't fight the feeling that "Dog Days" is a suffering pooch that should have been put down before things got unmanageably bad. This film is directed by Ken Marino and is the follow-up to his 2017 directorial debut "How To Be a Latin Lover." The screenplay is written by Erica Oyama, who is normally a television writer, and Elissa Matsueda, who wrote scripts for movies like "The Miracle Season" and surprisingly wonderful "Spare Parts." The story follows the lives of numerous different people living in Los Angeles and explores how dogs affect their day-to-day lives for good, bad, happy and sad. It features an ensemble cast including Vanessa Hudgens, Nina Dobrev, Finn Wolfhard, Eva Longoria, Adam Pally, Rob Corddry, Jon Bass, and Ron Cephas Jones, just to name a few.
"I always thought marketing was grocery shopping, like, my whole life." (Image Source)
"Dog Days" is truly awful. It is a boring slog that drags on and on and on with no end in sight. There's not enough story to warrant a nearly two-hour long film. Hell, there's not enough here for this movie to be 80 minutes long. In fact, it would have been much better suited as a short film. The story is an unfocused mess. If it had been focused on fewer characters and was cut down by at least a half hour, "Dog Days" may have been a teensy bit more bearable. Unfortunately, as it stands, we don't care about any of the characters or their foolish first-world problems. It's just a series of schmaltz-infested, mawkish, formulaic Hollywood dramatic tropes repeated for far too long. At one point while watching this movie, BigJ was feeling so restless that he had to check the time. He assumed it was almost over, but nope! It turned out there was still more than an hour of runtime left.

Watching this flick made for a painful experience in every conceivable way. Apart from the cute dogs, none of it works. The humor is nonexistent. We didn't laugh once, and we are very easy to please. The dialogue is cringe-worthy. The actions of some of the characters led us to believe that half of them are (or might become) stalkers, future rapists, serial home invaders, and/or humans who should not have general adult privileges. This is one of those films that is so unmistakably a contractual obligation for everyone involved that the actors couldn't even be bothered to phone-in their performances. We hope the paycheck they got was worth whatever irreparable damage that has been done to their careers.
"Sometimes I wish I was a dog with a fever so he could take my temperature." (Image Source)
"Dog Days" would almost certainly win a "world's ugliest dog" competition. The only tolerable thing about this literal pile of dog shit is the dogs themselves. How can a person not smile when a tiny shaking bag of bones Chihuahua is forced to wear a little pink protective helmet because his skull is soft? That being said, we can see cute dogs on YouTube for $0.00. Hell, we see two adorable dogs every single day when they wake us up each morning! We're dog lovers through and through, so this movie should be right up our alley. We are part of its target audience, and it was insufferable even for us. We can't imagine how people who don't like dogs might feel about it. We are utterly flabbergasted critics are being so kind to this rubbish movie.

My Rating: 1.5/10
BigJ's Rating: 1.5/10
IMDB's Rating: ~5.6/10
RT Rating: ~62%
Do we recommend this movie: AVOID LIKE THE PLAGUE!!!

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