Dog Days

August 10, 20186 min

There is probably a list out there of things you can add to a movie to make it instantly more likeable. On that list I would assume “cute” kid would be number one with a adding a dog being a close second. The question becomes can all of that cuteness take an otherwise unwatchable movie and make it watchable because of either of those two things on that list? Well, Dog Days is about to put that question to the test.

Tara (Vanessa Hudgens) works at a coffee shop where she spends her days wondering if she is wasting her education. In the middle of her life dilemma she serves coffee to people, like a hot looking Veterinarian named Dr. Mike (Michael Cassidy) and a man named Garrett (Jon Bass) who fails at getting Tara to notice him. While life is grand in the coffee shop, new parents Grace (Eva Longoria) and Kurt (Michael Corddry) are trying to make their new adopted daughter feel at home and part of the family. All of that is not working well until they find a lost dog which seems to be the missing piece to making them a family. While that found, we meet Walter (Ron Cephas Jones) who has lost a big piece of him as his dog has run away. Being alone Walter is lonely, that is until a pizza delivery boy named Tyler(Finn Wolfhard) befriends him. All of them are connected to each other by the dogs they have in their life, including a family welcoming twins and a brother who has never known responsibility until he had to take care of his sisters dog. All of it connects to a grand dog party at the end where everyone gets what they want including the four legged ones, who are the real stars of this movie.

As you can tell from the synopsis above this is one of those everything in connected stories that has that Garry Marshall feel to it, like Valentine’s Day or Mother‘s Day. If you remember anything about those films it was probably that as they went on they were not very good. Have no worries though the makers behind Dog Days have a secret weapon and that hinges on who let the dogs out. Dogs are all over this movie and as some bad pieces of dialogue are said or a particular storyline is going nowhere, enter a dog and all of a sudden what you are seeing is watchable. I mean sure the story is a predictable as the sun coming up and some of the characters could have been played by life size cut outs , but every scene with a dog had me saying , “ yeah but did you see that cute dog?” Not all the humans are bad, with Hudgens and Wolfhard leading the way they keep some entertained. But let’s not kid ourselves here, we didn’t come for the cast of humans, what you are coming to this movie for is to enjoy a film filled with lots of dogs. And there are plenty of those and it is the dogs that save this film from being hard to watch. I say we reward them for that, so up their treat count, start rubbing their bellies and let’s hear for the dogs for distracting us from knowing how bad this movie truly could have been.

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