Cert – U, Run-time – 1 hour 29 minutes, Director – Peter Hastings
Police officer Dog Man is constantly battling with evil cat Petey (Pete Davidson), who wishes to take over the world. However, Petey’s schemes begin to tangle, showing links between the pair and bringing the city further to destruction.
For fans of 2017’s Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie this spin-off, based on a comic created by main characters George and Harold, will go down a treat. An equally silly, brightly-coloured, sub-90-minute cartoon caper full of silliness. With an animation style matching the idea of a child-drawn comic, and the illustrations in source book writer Dav Pilkey’s illustrations, the images pop from the screen from the opening frames and assure as to what kind of film is going to unfold over the next hour-and-a-bit.
When Police Officer Knight (writer-director Peter Hastings) and his dog Greg are involved in a bomb-defusal gone wrong the medics operating on the pair see the only way forward as sowing one’s head onto the other’s body. Thus, by combining their respective strengths, Dog Man is born. Just as soon as this happens then orange, human-sized cat Petey (Pete Davidson, creating a good deal of fun with this character labelled ‘the evilest cat in the world’) tries to take the titular officer down through a series of towering robot traps. Each backfires and lands the quick-to-escape feline in cat jail. However, when his various schemes begin to backfire they also create links to Dog Man, especially through the creation of a clone, Lucas Hopkins Calderon’s innocently amusing Li’l Petey, and threaten to destroy the city.
Alongside giant vacuum cleaner traps racing down the streets this is a film where you simply buy into the idea of a factory which creates gas which can bring anything to life. Again, much like it’s come from the mind of a child here it’s hard not to embrace it as another simply silly, and very funny idea. The world and narrative are full of consistently funny cartoon-style antics which help to move an otherwise thin plot – for the most part this feels more like a set of funny ideas loosely strung together into a narrative, although the successful humour gives this a slight, but not entire, pass in this case. Each character has their own quirk which manages to provide visual gags – even as simple as Lil Rel Howery’s police chief’s protective obsession with doughnuts – unfolding at the same time as those contained in the dialogue.
In a number of ways, Dog Man is quite a straightforward comedy in the way that it presents itself and constructs its jokes. Much like Captain Underpants before it, humour is put at the fore of this spin-off. Yes, the other elements are given plenty of time, effort and thought, but there appears to be a collaborative effort here to make a funny film. There are plenty of laugh-out-loud funny moments throughout in a mixture of styles, all catering towards the family audience – if parents can embrace the cartoon absurdities on display there’s just as much to enjoy here as there is for the kids. Whilst chasing Petey in the opening scene, Knight and Greg crash through a ‘Box Of Bees’ in the middle of the road; across the ground spills numerous letter ‘B’s, I was quickly won over and in place for the rest of the film as it breezed by for a largely untroubled, albeit occasionally thin, 89-minutes.
A loud and very funny family comedy, Dog Man’s brightly-coloured animation is packed with fun characters who bring about plenty of visual and verbal gags, helping to largely move aside from the occasionally thin plotting.
Just A Little Bit Random 