A Dog’s Purpose

Date Released: 4th May 2017 (Australian release date)

Date Seen: 30th October 2017

I have two dogs in my home right now as I type this… the stuff that they leave in large dark brown clumps that I occasionally step in is more inviting/interesting/decent than this movie.

A Dog’s Purpose is a film about a dog named Bailey and his repeated attempts to find his purpose. On the way he ends up with a pretty nice owner named Ethan who he spends the entire film missing because… oh boy. Oh boy. OH BOY!

This film kills 5 dogs. Let’s just get that out of the way right up the top, 5 dogs die in this film and 1 of those deaths IS BEING SHOT AND KILLED BY A KIDNAPPER! I have now seen a dog lying in a crying cops arms while bleeding slowly to death because that’s a thing I desperately needed to see in my lifetime. Another one is put down in a pretty emotional scene, another one just get’s taken by a dog catcher and his death is implied, a fourth is taken to the vet and “Never came home again” and the fifth dies from… age? I think it just get’s old and died. Point is there are six dogs featured in this film, five of them are Josh Gad and five out of the six (One of the Josh Gad dogs survives) end up dying on screen where your children can see it. This film got a G rating by the way.

The acting in this film couldn’t have been worse if it tried and I think they actively tried. There was no one who acted believably, no one who I even cared about. You had Dennis Quaid and K.J Apa taking on the role of the lead male and honestly, were they trying to make him pinching his own nipple the way that we were to notice it was the same person? Because that’s all we get, they don’t even look that similar and just… it’s irritating because I know they’re good actors, I’m sure everyone here is but not in this film. In this film they’re all boring and basic and I do not like them. I especially don’t like that they all signed onto a film that has a body count of five dead dogs. This film is meant to be seen by families, by the way.

The storyline is insane and stupid. We follow this dog through his five lives (Cos remember, he dies four times and one of those times he’s a girl, yay for dogs being gender fluid!) and each time he tries to find his purpose. His purpose is apparently to be captured, put down, shot, die of old age, and then help an aging Dennis Quaid get his high school girlfriend back because that’s something worthy of multiple deceased animals. This film was made by people who thought it was a holiday family treat worthy of your money, by. the. way.

By the time you get to the third dead dog, you actively hate this film. I literally yelled at it for daring to play Aha’s Take On Me because this film does not deserve that kind of music. It doesn’t deserve the Bee Gee’s either and it has the audacity to play that as well. This means this film got a lot of money, those songs are not cheap and neither is Dennis Quaid or Josh Gad. This means that some producer in an office somewhere sat down, read the script about the five dead dogs helping Mike Brody from Jaws 3-D get his dick wet and decided to throw it an assload of cash in hopes of entertaining small children who thought they were coming to see a cute puppy movie and would walk out with the knowledge that all dogs must be killed in order for love to happen.

In case my irritated repetition did not make it clear, I absolutely detest this movie with every fiber of my being. My anger for this film was so intense and so extreme that my own dog decided that its purpose was to sit by my feet because it could tell I was not happy in any fashion. This film is an awful film with an awful script, awful acting, awful story and an awful lot of deceased canines littering the frame… oh, and one dead cat. I almost forgot about him, he was cute in that scene where one of the dogs digs up the dead cat and carries it around… because, apparently, that’s funny.

Show your kids Emoji Movie instead. Sure, that film is a pandering slogfest that tries to indoctrinate kids into worshipping the corporations that founded it and will reduce their capacity to love and feel human emotions, but at least that film doesn’t use nearly half a dozen dead dogs as some kind of pathetic plot device!

0/10