Dog's Purpose, A

Lasse Hallström, who started his professional life making videos for ABBA, has had a long and successful career making glossy-looking, squarely middle-of-the-road films embodying some kind of truistic moral with a sentimentally uplifting agenda.  It is an approach which he has repeated over and over again since his first feature, the internationally successful My Life As A Dog in 1985 (which, fyi, was not about a dog). Not my cup of tea but as his latest film has had a surprisingly long theatrical run, I surmised that despite its title and, so to speak, its pedigree, it must have something special about it...Wrong!

If the formulaic underpinnings of Hallström films are readily evident whatever the specifics of their narratives, At Dog's Purpose is pretty much the formula delivered neat. From the opening scene which is set in Michigan in the early 1960’s in which the canine hero. Bailey (in reality, the voice of Josh Gad), introduces us to his life story Hallström and his team of writers ladle out the treacle with the kind of merciless indulgence that Walt Disney would have loved (the film was produced by Steven Spielberg’s company, Amblin).

Even during this, the longest section of the film, one still hopes that, surely, it is going somewhere interesting but when Bailey suddenly dies (seemingly of loneliness for his master) and gets re-incarnated as a German Shepherd, in a sequence that appears to have been inspired by Lassie, all such naiveté evaporates. One can only watch numbly as Bailey gets reincarnated again as a Corgi, then again as mutt who is, the law of Karma apparently not working very well, neglected by its owners before eventually he finds his original master (now played by a beaten-up looking Dennis Quaid), re-unites him with his old girlfriend and reveals to us that a dog’s purpose (look away, a spoiler is coming) is “to be here now”.

Clearly the box office success of A Dog's Purpose is a function of its reassuringly sentimental content. On this basis as an entertainment for, presumably, children and dyed-in-the-wool dog lovers it evidently works. Everyone else should avoid it.

 

Want something different?