Old Dogs | Family Comedy | rated PG (A) | starring Robin Williams, John Travolta, Kelly Preston, Seth Green | 1:28 mins
Life long friends and sports marketers Dan (Robin Williams) and Charlie (John Travolta) find their best marketing pitch story coming back to bite them when the woman whom Dan once had a night of taquila with at Charlie’s insistance shows up with two small children that belong to Dan. Dan insists on taking them for the next two weeks, but the biggest deal of their lives is put on the line while Dan and Charlie find themselves up to their necks in fatherly duties.
Old Dogs loudly and obnoxiously boasts one of the most tired of family movie premises. The bachelor businessman who finds his life turned upside down by kids – cuing wacky kid hijinks – and his heart warmed to the idea of family – cue the schmaltzy love-over-money morality lecture. I would say that it is a studio assembly line picture but director Walt Becker has been this way before with John Travolta in the mind-numbing Wild Hogs. My memory of Hogs has faded, like a mom who forgets the pain of childbirth, so I stumbled into Dogs and all those bad memories came flooding back.
Travolta and Williams ham it up here, but they aren’t at all the movie’s problem. They do their best with the material they have and get a free pass. The blame falls squarely on Becker (something I wouldn’t thought I’d say given that Seth Green is in the movie hamming it up). Any way you slice it this is a poorly directed picture. Slaming a woman’s hands in a car truck can be funny and it probably has been in the past, but when you’ve got Walt Becker blasting “Big Girls Don’t Cry” over the scene, it goes from not funny to painfully unfunny. That scene early on sets the tone perfectly as the rest of the movie is full of broad jokes that are all either brutally botched or head-scratching to begin with. A lot of the set pieces here are based on a bit that either doesn’t exist and isn’t relatable or is completely impossible. We’re supposed to laugh and Dan and Charlie being confused for grandparents, but I’ve never heard of restaurants singing to senior citizens the way they sing to someone celebrating a birthday. At another point Travolta wears a suit that allows him to electronically, remotely move Robins, also in a suit, like a puppet. Surely that will go as planned, right? What could go wrong? The bit is so convoluted on it’s face it’s impossible to relate to or get your head around when, where or how it is supposed to be funny. The movie is continually, obviously scripted for Dan and Charlie to do things that are set up for failure. And don’t even get me started on the killer penguins and random cameos from Dax Shepard, Luis Guzman and Justin Long.
It is preordained that Dan will give up his working life and fall hard for those cute kids. The movie approaches it as just such. It got me thinking. This is fundamentally a love story, a paternal one between father and children. But the movie, like many of it’s ilk, makes no effort to develop the relationship between Dan and his children. There is no point where Dan bonds with them, sees them as little versions of him and generally there is no reason for us to buy their relationship because it isn’t sold to us. The kids in this movie have no personalities, they are just “kids” standing in for your own. That is why, behind the slapstick and the misplaced musical cues, there is a cynical backbone to a movie like Old Dogs. It panders to families, relying on you to bring your own preconceptions and baggage into the movie as an excuse to not take the time to develop an authentic relationship itself. “Hey, they’re kids, of course he loves them”. But I say just like in a romantic comedy, this kind of love story also needs to be earned and nourished to work when the movie traffics in a Brian Adams montage or has Dan racing to his kid’s birthday party to prove how much he cares. It wants to slap on “emotion” but doesn’t want to do the leg work to get us there.
Old Dogs is a witless, charmless, big, clanking piece of studio hackery masquerading as a family comedy. Too contrived, ineptly assembled and detached from reality to be funny. I was shocked to hear it was only an hour and a half, it’s barrage of over-the-top screeching set pieces feel endless. If you like your slapstick broad, your sentiment an after thought and your acting hammy this is the movie for you.