Josh Greenbaum, the director of Strays, probably had a VHS copy of Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey when he was a kid. For the uninitiated, it was a family-friendly film about three pets, two dogs and a cat, who go on an adventure through the wilderness in order to find their owners. Michael J. Fox, Don Ameche and Sally Field provided voice roles for the pets, who can talk to each other but not humans. Strays is a lot like Homeward Bound, with the addition of nonstop f-bombs and poop jokes. The four-legged characters may be foul-mouthed and horny, although Greenbaum and his screenwriter Dan Perrault preserve the pure, basic sweetness that defines the connection between dogs and owners. If it is not exactly a good movie, at least it understands its place and never waivers from those modest goals.
Will Ferrell plays Reggie, a scrappy looking mutt whose owner Doug (Will Forte) is a self-absorbed asshole. Doug hates Reggie, who is clueless to the neglectful treatment he receives because dogs are so trusting of their owners, who they see as benevolent gods. One day Doug abandons Reggie in the big city, and after a close call with a rottweiler, Reggie meets a Boston terrier named Bug (Jamie Foxx). Bug is a stray, and insists that Reggie is just like him, but Reggie’s unreciprocated loyalty makes him blind to the truth. They become friends, anyway, and Bug teaches Reggie the ways of the street. A plot emerges when Reggie accepts his status, and his love of Doug curdles into anger. He wants to return home, all right, but not to be with Doug again. He wants to bite off Doug’s dick.
Strays develops an episodic structure, with Bug helping Reggie on his quest back to Doug’s squalid home. They get an assist from two other strays: a former police hound named Hunter (Randall Park), and Maggie (Isla Fisher), a collie with a strong sense of smell who was abandoned because she’s not cute enough. Greenbaum and Perrault find the humor through imagining an anthropomorphized version of a dog’s nature, and also through the “meat and potatoes” approach to R-rated comedy. Bug has a romantic subplot with a soiled couch, for example, and there is a scene where the four strays react to fireworks like it’s an invasion on the scale of D-Day.
Absolutely nothing in Strays is surprising, especially if you enjoy following pet accounts on social media, so the creative team picks up the slack with the high energy of its voice cast. Ferrell borrows his wide-eyed innocence from Elf, while Foxx turns Bug into a furry version of his stand-up act. If the film has big laughs, they come from inevitability and not surprise.
You might think Strays is a lot like Sausage Party, an animated film that imagines what might happen if food in a grocery store had feelings and personalities. That would be a mistake, because Sausage Party becomes an allegory about organized religion – yes, really – while Strays never aspires for any subtext. What you see is what you get, right down to jokes about Walter’s giant dick, and kennel workers slipping in dog shit. That is the film’s weakness, and also its strength. It invites audiences to think about their own pets, and the personalities they might have, since the handling of this material is as superficial as a comedy sketch. Although Reggie gets his revenge on Doug, Strays preserves a sweetness because dogs, in the minds of the filmmakers, have a purity of heart that does not get reciprocated as often it should. That may not be enough to a sustain a feature-length film, but if you’re also the sort of person who realizes you’re not above puerile humor – and to be clear, none of us are – then it might be enough.
Photo courtesy of Universal Pictures
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