‘Dog Man’ 4K UHD Digital (review)

Universal Studios

RoboCop is among my favorite movies of all time. That 1987 original recipe, directed by Peter Verhoeven and starring Peter Weller. The score by Basil Poledouris that’s part sci-fi action hero, part Western. Kurtwood Smith so completely committed as the delightfully wicked Clarence Boddicker. The sociopolitical satire, the laughs, the buckets of blood, the body horror, and the heartbreaking drama.

Dog Man looks at RoboCop and says, now what if dog instead of cyborg?

Dog Man takes that subtext for the Gen X and millennial parents of this film’s audience and puts it right on the poster by turning the RoboCop tagline into, “Part dog. Part man. All hero.”

And, by gum, it works. It works, a lot!

Dog Man is shot through with like 18 gags a minute for its entire run time while seasoning in kid-movie-friendly takes on loneliness, belonging, even generational trauma.

I could expect that Dog Man, as a movie, could maintain the books’ childlike approach to what is a truly horrifying premise. The horror: a police officer and his dog suffer life-threatening head and body injuries, respectively, in the line of duty. The childlike approach: they were hunting down a supervillain cat, and medical professionals decide to sew the dog’s viable head onto the police officer’s viable body. The dog, a very smart boy, has his brains matched with dummy Officer Knight’s kung fu-knowing body. Easy-peasy!

For the uninitiated, Dog Man is its own line of graphic novels that spun off the Captain Underpants books, in which lead characters George Beard and Harold Hutchins first create Dog Man comic books as kindergartners. This is exactly the kind of stuff 6-year-old me, awash in superheroes, might have thought up.

That energy goes right off the rip, with an action-packed opening sequence that gleefully teases out the fateful explosion that would set in motion the creation of the man-dog hybrid. Officer Knight blunders his way through several near-misses in the first few minutes, and even a flashback shows him dumbly teetering on catastrophe.

All the dog antics you hope for do show up, including how Dog Man headbutts into people’s arms for pets. (Though I don’t remember if they explained whether Dog Man uses a toilet.) I didn’t expect, however, how the movie would lean into the deep However, because it’s a kids’ animated movie, that melancholy is broken up by an obliviously comical real estate agent. Or Dog Man’s lonely walk home to a simple doghouse exterior reveals an interior that is absurdly furnished like a full-on people house, including an attic bedroom.

The movie does a fine job of 3D rendering the Dog Man comics’ aesthetic of suped-up stick figures, even if the general look of it feels very Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and the score sounds like The Incredibles light. (Not bad films to copy, mind you.)

Dog Man throws an emotional wrench into the central conflict against Petey, known as “the world’s most evilest cat.” But I won’t spoil that for you.

Not for nothing, but the fact that the titular Dog Man can’t speak except for grunts and barks (provided by writer/director Peter Hastings) allows for the movie to be more cinematic because it must show Dog Man’s emotions and motivations rather than tell the viewer through dialog.

Between his work in Dog Man as the petulant, but ultimately wounded Petey and as the brash Mirage in Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, Pete Davidson is primed for a long career of voiceover work for whichever snotty punk of a character he may portray.

Above all, though, Dog Man is funny. It throws every gag it can think of, whether wordy jokes or genre spoofs in that Zucker Brothers mile-a-minute pace. Not only is it the gags, but the details on the gags. The little touches between the jokes that make the jokes come alive. The comedy jazz of playing the notes between the notes.

Newscaster Sarah Hatoff (Isla Fisher) introduces herself on a report saying that she’s standing in the rain without an umbrella as “that’s how serious this is.” There’s a Captain Steubing reference put in the mouth of a rambling officer voiced by, you guessed it, Lunell. This is a world of cloning machines and a spray that makes anything come to life. A montage of Dog Man foiling Petey’s schemes and hauling him off to Cat Jail is preceded by someone announcing the montage. The Mayor (Cheri Oteri) sneaks in a damning detail about Cat Jail’s quality while shouting at the police Chief (Lil Rel Howery) when Petey escapes again.

There was an old familiar comedic sting to every bit, something I hadn’t seen since … well, the 1990s. And when I looked up writer/director Peter Hastings, it all made sense. Before Hastings ensconced himself in the Captain Underpants universe, he worked at Warner Bros. Animation on Tiny Toon Adventures, Pinky and the Brain, and Animaniacs.

Extras include commentary, deleted and extended scenes, and featurettes.

It’s that old Animaniacs manic magic that makes Dog Man sing. Go have big, dumb fun with this one.