It’s rather impressive how thoroughly writer/director Luc Besson flubs handling the obvious potential of an insane premise in DogMan, a sort-of thriller that is kind of about revenge if you squint at it. In actuality, the movie is not about anything, since Besson filters this entire story through the representative act of storytelling within the surrounding fictional context. Yes, this is another movie in which its protagonist narrates the events we see to another person, whose only job is to react to whatever is being told to them. That, of course, means two things: We must care about the characters in the framing device, and we must find something in which to be invested in the story that the framing device serves.
Movies have done this since time immemorial, and it only works when the screenwriter has given us characters to care about on two levels. On the topmost of those two levels is the “present” of the movie’s setting, which in this case is a conversation between Doug (Caleb Landry Jones), a recently incarcerated prisoner, and Evelyn (Jojo T. Gibbs), a psychiatrist who has been assigned to his examination. Before facing whatever fate awaits him on the other side of this interview, Doug obviously has to think about his whole life, and that’s the gimmick of this story, which traces the layers of abuse that have led Doug to a life of drudgery, disappointment, and vigilantism.
The title, by the way, refers to what the locals in his town call him, on account of Doug’s predilection toward the company and innate ability to control the canine persuasion. It began during a childhood pockmarked by the trauma of a father and older brother who belittled him, locked him in cages on regular occasions, and otherwise treated him like one of the dogs in their massive kennels full of pets, which they also abused. An incident with a handgun left Doug paralyzed from the waist down and missing one finger on his right hand, and the cycle of violent vengeance began in exactly the way one might expect. Fast-forward to his adult years, and we find Doug as an awkward, antisocial young man who enjoys performing multiple nights per week in a drag show, while the rest of his days are spent taking care of his dogs.
This is a weird movie, obviously, and it grows even stranger over two generous hours: We learn of his one-time true love Salma (Grace Palma), whose mentorship in the ways of theater led to his fervent love of William Shakespeare and his current gig, but that fell apart upon their reunion in adulthood and her marriage after making it big. What any of that has to do with his current predicament, which involves a ruthless local gangster and his army of minions, is anyone’s guess, and so the movie seems divided between its desire to dig into Doug’s past and its intentions as a stylish thriller.
The result is a movie that splits the difference by barely functioning in either mode. As a thriller, the movie fails to garner or earn any tension, since most of the dialogue here – even in the past, away from the droning narration of the present – exists to relay information to us or other characters. As a character study, DogMan fails to provide a character beyond the acknowledgment that Doug is perhaps sort of an intriguing one because he’s so odd. Jones’ performance gets us partway there, but it’s a classic example of an actor delivering far more than the page gives us.
Photo courtesy of Briarcliff Entertainment
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