I’d say that DogMan must be the first movie made exclusively for doggy audiences (not unlike Dethklok’s Dethwater album was intended for fish only), were it not that even dogs are too smart for this nonsense.
Douglas Munrow (Caleb Landry Jones) is a paraplegic drag queen who can communicate with dogs. In his own words, “Not only were they my best friends, my most faithful companions, but they also understood absolutely everything I told them.” For example, Doug is going to bake a cake and he asks his dogs to bring him specific ingredients (flour, sugar, butter), and they do.
Doug has had this ability since he was a young boy and his abusive father shot him with a long-barreled firearm. Doug survived the shooting but lost the use of his legs, so what did he do? He showed one of his father’s dogs a magazine with a police car on the cover and told it to go find one and lead the cops back to the scene of the crime.
Allegedly, Doug’s father organized dog fights for a living, but the pooch that Doug sent for help looks like a mangy Benji — a “chicken mutt,” according to a police officer. The other cop actually says, and I quote, “He looks like he’s trying to tell us something.” This line is delivered without the slightest trace of irony.
In the present day, Doug has his own army of dog burglars that he very occasionally (that is to say, once) employs to right a wrong — like getting gang leader El Verdugo (John Charles Aguilar) to stop collecting protection money from Doug’s unseen friend Martha.
First, Doug sends a small dog with a phone in its mouth into El Verdugo’s bar. The dog climbs on El Verdugo’s table and drops the phone, which starts ringing. El Verdugo answers the call and he and Doug start talking.
Then, Doug sends in a bigger dog. The second cur goes under the table and teabags El Verdugo. Doug demands that El Verdugo “quit extorting the hell out of [Martha] or my dog gobbles your gonads right this second.” El Verdugo acquiesces for the time being. That’s it for this underdeveloped subplot until it’s time for the other shoe to drop (i.e., the obligatory climactic shootout).
Do dogs understand all humans but choose to ignore most of them? Or is there an anomaly in Doug’s speech that renders him comprehensible to canines? Or maybe A Wizard Did It? The closest to an explanation that the film offers is that Doug’s father kept him locked in same the cage with the dogs.
And you know what? That’s a mystery I can live with. What I’m more interested in is, how does a dog know what sugar is? How can it it tell “plain flour” from bread flour, or wheat flour? How does it know that it is indeed fetching “250 grams of unsalted butter” as opposed to, say, a 500g pack? Can these mongrels read English as well as understand it?
Moreover, of all the people inside the aforementioned bar, how did Doug’s dog know which one was El Verdugo? How did the first dog know who to deliver the cell phone to? (as for the second dog, I guess it was just following the first dog’s lead).
Doug has heard of El Verdugo, but does he know what he looks like? (as it turns out, he doesn’t even know the guy’s real name) Doug knows El Verdugo “just opened a bar on 3rd Street,” but has Doug cased the joint? Is he familiar with the layout of the place? What if El Verdugo had been standing behind the bar instead of sitting at a table? And so on and so forth.
Writer/director Luc Besson simply shows Doug sitting in his wheelchair across the street from the bar, signaling his pets into action with a slight nod. Wait, so now the fucking dogs can read Doug’s mind? Or did Doug brief them beforehand, and the mutts not only got the gist of it at the time but also managed to remember later what it was that they were supposed to do?
And then there’s the burglaries, which present their own logistical issues, but that’s not what bothers me the most about them. If dogs truly had, as Doug claims they do, “all the virtues humans have without any of the vices,” they would refuse to go along with Doug’s larcenous schemes (and since the dogs understand “absolutely everything,” they must know what they’re doing is wrong).
Conversely, if Doug really loved dogs as much as he says he does, he wouldn’t have them do the dirty work for his own personal profit (Doug states that he believes in “the redistribution of wealth,” and while he certainly doesn’t look like he’s spending any money on himself, what exactly he does with his ill-gotten gains, I haven’t the foggiest; as far as I can tell, Doug is a miser on top of a thief).
All things considered, that’s arguably DogMan’s biggest problem; for all of their uncanny skills (that would feel contrived even in a comedy, which this movie most certainly is not), the dogs are little more than Doug’s pawns — an extension of his character rather than characters in their own right. They are interchangeable and lack personality; furthermore, if they had any self-respect, they would tear two-faced Doug down, not prop him up.
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