Dog hits theaters on Feb. 18, 2022.
Dog, which stars Channing Tatum as a former U.S. Army Ranger tasked with chauffeuring a traumatized military canine, presents itself as a feel-good road trip comedy with occasional animal melodrama and sprinkles of wartime commentary. However, it’s both funnier and more shocking than its filmmakers seem to realize (not to mention, filled with the kind of tonal whiplash reserved for so-bad-it’s-good midnight cinema). It’s a blast from start to finish, whether for the right reasons or the wrong ones. Their rightness or wrongness hardly matters when the result is not only this sincere, but so downright bizarre that it manages to deconstruct an entire Hollywood subgenre.
Co-directed by Tatum and Magic Mike writer Reid Carolin (and co-written by Carolin and Brett Rodriguez), Dog bears resemblance to other recent war dramas about soldiers and their Belgian Shepherds, like Max and Megan Leavey. These films take understandably somber approaches, but they’re also blinkered — like many Hollywood movies about war trauma tend to be — explorations of the experiences of American soldiers in a way that feels disconnected from the big picture of the war itself. At the risk of making their human subjects too flawed, fallible, or even distasteful, they sever them from perspectives on surrounding places, people, and experiences (largely in the Middle East), turning them into broad, dimensionless cutouts of jingoistic heroism. Dog starts out similarly, with characters whose defining trait is having been to war together, but whose interactions all conform to American cinema’s straightforward military “type,” with broad machismo standing in for real and nuanced humanity. However, as the film begins to take outlandish turns into sketch comedy territory, it occasionally offers a peek behind this façade, at the real scars of war — both those experienced by soldiers like Briggs (Tatum), and those they inflict on other people.
On one hand, describing its malformed thematic gravitas is a disservice to how light-hearted it tries to be. On the other hand, the fact that these two opposing forces keep brushing up against each other — sometimes intentionally, other times very much not — is what makes it so fascinating and hilarious. It’s as much the serious and uber violent Max as it is its inexplicably comedic, Disney Channel-esque sequel Max 2: White House Hero.
Briggs, a man trying to get back to his old post in Syria despite a lingering brain injury, finally has the opportunity when his commanding officer, Jones (Luke Forbes), orders him to drive the aggressive war dog Lulu to her handler’s funeral. The handler in question, Rodriguez (Eric Urbiztondo), was one of Briggs’ unit mates, and while he didn’t die in combat, his death from an apparent drunk-driving accident hints at a darker post-war story, on which Dog never actually touches, and which its characters only mention in the form of casual banter. For the most part, that’s the vibe Dog gives off when it comes to war. Briggs and his fellow soldiers all discuss it with a laid-back, joking cadence, but what they talk about is always deeply disturbing. The disconnect often borders on nonsensical, but in a way that cracks open the reality of euphemisms being used to paint over bloodshed in bright hues of red, white, and blue. It inadvertently reveals what’s actually being discussed beneath the surface when characters bond wistfully over deployment.
Even though Carolin and Tatum drag Briggs and Lulu through a number of eccentric scenarios (featuring side characters ripped from various mid-2000s stoner comedies), their framing of Briggs soon reveals what kind of story they’re attempting, by contrasting it with the kinds of stories everyone around him wants to tell. Briggs doesn’t have any larger concerns or opinions other than getting back into the field, and he barely seems worried about the lasting effects of the visible scars on his head and torso. However, almost everyone he runs into on the way to Rodriguez’s funeral seems to have one opinion or another about racism, masculinity, and the military industrial complex. The film doesn’t balk at these ideas, which usually take the form of accusations against Briggs, but rather, it uses them to highlight how one-tracked the character is when it comes to getting back to the war that defines his identity.
Briggs is also one-tracked about getting laid whenever Dog decides to become a raunchy sex comedy with a dash of orientalism, but no matter what strange new form it takes, Lulu’s presence along the journey keeps yanking Briggs back to uncomfortable memories. Her distressed yelping is sobering, even when Briggs is trying to rush his way into a threesome. At times, this balancing act works, and the film is able to transition smoothly between juvenile college humor and hints of something heavier. When Lulu attacks people (including Briggs himself), the result is usually entertaining — there are prat-falls galore — but Briggs knows, better than anyone, that her hair-trigger behavior is a result of the horrors she’s seen. He’s seen them too, and he tries to lock thoughts of her experiences away, alongside his own.
The filmmakers aren’t ignorant of this stark reality. Dog has its roots in a 2017 documentary that Carolin and Tatum produced for HBO, titled War Dog: A Soldier's Best Friend. Their approach to man-dog camaraderie and to the lasting scars of combat is incredibly genuine, which makes it all the more puzzling that they would tell this story as if it were a Jump Street spin-off. Tatum approaches Briggs with his signature fast-talking energy from those movies, in which he’s a goofy jock on a mission, only he swaps Jonah Hill for an animal with PTSD (who he still talks to in complete sentences, and refers to only as “dog”). At times, the film plays like a Himbo remix of Simple Jack, the fictitious Oscar-bait movie within Tropic Thunder, only instead of award-hungry cynicism, Tatum’s approach has an almost childlike earnestness. This in turn leads to a number of sudden dramatic left-turns regarding Briggs’ backstory, which are dropped as suddenly and awkwardly as they’re introduced, making the whole thing play like a fever dream.
Tatum’s sincerity also clashes wildly with the film’s well-meaning social commentary, but in a way that’s startlingly funny all on its own. Sometimes, individual scenes lash back and forth between silly and solemn. At one point, Lulu attacks a Muslim man in traditional garb, Dr. Al-Farid (Junes Zahdi), because that’s what she was trained to do, leading to emotionally piercing close ups as both Briggs and the innocent doctor realize what’s really happening. However, this silent moment of mutual recognition is also nestled within a riotous comedic scene of Briggs pretending to be blind in order to get a fancy hotel room.
The tonal clashes are incredibly surreal. Carolin and Tatum make the effort to paint Dr. Al-Farid not only with a sense of dignity, but with something bordering on divinity when they later present him through reflected glass, like a shot out of an arthouse drama, but this also occurs in the middle of a sequence that would feel at home on an NBC sitcom. Similarly, there’s a moment (during one of the many unfocused plot detours) where Briggs ends up lurking in the shadows, weapon in hand, in order to rescue Lulu from a seemingly dangerous predicament, and the contrast-heavy lighting illuminates slivers of his face like he’s Marlon Brando’s deeply disturbed Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now. His deathly dramatic closeup then leads into yet another joking scenario, but this callback isn’t the joke in and of itself. There are always a dozen different things happening on various levels in Dog, and almost none of them mesh. It’s jaw-dropping to watch.
For Briggs himself, there isn’t really much point to the film’s larger events or their underlying commentary (beyond him learning to get along with Lulu as they drive around listening to country tunes). He isn’t the kind of person who learns much from these interactions, at least in a way that manifests in his behavior. Late into the film, he still talks about Lulu’s exploits in the field as if they were happy memories, which he reads from a violent scrap book — an “I Love Me” brag book — as if it were a children’s bedtime story. However, the sharper this disconnect becomes, the more it feels as if Dog is trying to express how deeply messed up its own characters are without offering them an ounce of self-awareness. It borders on misanthropic and almost mocking, engendering at least some amount of sympathy for Briggs, but it ultimately leads to a head-spinning bigger picture not unlike Dear Evan Hansen, where the movie plays out completely seriously but still somehow feels like a prank.
Its presentation of PTSD is fascinating at times, especially since Briggs is often in denial about his experiences. There’s a point at which it even frames his wacky comedic antics as an unhealthy extension of his trauma, and he only ever comes to the slightest of realizations about himself by watching Lulu’s disturbed behavior, and by seeing parts of himself in her. There’s a commendable dramatic tension during silent moments between Briggs and Lulu, and the three canine actors who play her — Britta, Zuza, and Lana — are afforded more loving humanity, through lasting and silent close ups, than most actual human soldiers in the film, which feels like the most subversive and daring commentary any Hollywood war movie has made in years, only it seems to have arrived at this point by accident.
The way Carolin and Tatum frame physical comedy is always effective. How Lulu enters or exits the frame, and the timing with which it’s edited together, keeps Dog feeling light on its feet despite its occasionally morose turns. It’s well-assembled from a visual standpoint, even if that assembly is in service of a undisciplined comedic structure with largely interchangeable scenarios, and well-meaning but deeply haphazard attempts to make exacting commentary about what the people (and dogs) sent to fight wars end up losing in the process.
Despite all this, part of the fun is making a mental note of the many things Dog tries to be all at once. It’s like watching a toddler in a Bob the Builder construction trying to assemble an enormous tower out of tiny wooden blocks: You know it’s going to tip over at some point, but you wait, and you let them go through with it, because the naïve effort is commendable. The film is funny when it tries to be, and sobering in parts as well, but it’s exponentially more effective when its funny and sobering moments get crisscrossed, resulting in an unintentionally uproarious experience bordering on outsider art from two long-time insiders.
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