- Starring
- Pete Davidson, Poppy Liu, Lil Rel Howery
- Director
- Peter Hastings
- Rating
- PG
- Genre
- Action, Adventure, Animation, Comedy, Crime, Family
- Release date
- Jan 31, 2025
Overall Score
Rating Overview
Rating Summary
Based on Dav Pilkey’s hit children’s graphic novel series, Dog Man brings the action-packed, goofy adventure to life. After a bomb explosion fuses Officer Knight with his loyal police dog, Greg, the heroic hybrid Dog Man is born. Now, he’s on a mission to take down the dastardly feline villain, Petey, while navigating the antics of Petey’s well-meaning clone, Li’l Petey.
Dog Man Review
It’s an unfortunate trend, but many modern films tend to feel unnaturally stretched to fit the runtime, often with uninteresting or even nonsensical subplots and characters lumped in as filler. Refreshingly, Dog Man uses every part of the buffalo. It is lean, mean, and laser-focused, with a small cast of characters and a trim plot that unapologetically fits within its 90 minutes.
The story is not deeply complex, but it wields its universal themes with style and brevity that keep things crisp and fun. It also has just enough heart to draw in the audience and make them care about the rather silly potential consequences.
Dog Man isn’t exactly treading new ground, and its immaturity might turn off some parents. Still, its plucky style and offbeat perspective offer enough to warrant buying a ticket for families looking for something to do together.
FULL DISCLOSURE
- As of writing this, I haven’t felt well for a few days. As such, I dozed off for about five minutes total, spread out over the film’s second act. Therefore, I could have missed something belonging in the following two sections. However, based on the 99% of the film that I did see, I’m confident I got everything.
- That said, please be sure to comment below if you see something I missed when you watch it.
PARENTAL NOTES
Important Information for Parents
Our Parental Notes flag the material parents may want to know about before pressing play, including profanity, blasphemy, adult content, extreme violence, frightening intensity, hyper-stimulating sequences, and other family-content concerns.
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James Carrick
James Carrick is a passionate film enthusiast with a degree in theater and philosophy. James approaches dramatic criticism from a philosophic foundation grounded in aesthetics and ethics, offering insight and analysis that reveals layers of cinematic narrative with a touch of irreverence and a dash of snark.
I liked Captain Underpants when I was small. When the 12th book (Sir Stinks-A-Lot, I believe) came out decades later, I discovered it had a lot of inappropriate, cynical, politically-themed things in it. I dropped the book in disgust halfway through and never picked up another Captain Underpants book ever again. Toilet jokes I can handle, but wokeness is intolerable.
I haven’t read any Dog Man books, but I see them on grocery store shelves and I see a lot of small children reading them. I don’t know what’s in them, but the illustrations look ugly by design. I’m afraid to pick them up and read them because I don’t think I will like what I see.
All I can say is that my sons (12 and 8) really did not laugh one time during the film. And they are usually not stingy when it comes to laughs.
This film was quite bad. Like the writers were just either on an acid trip, or making up what to do as they went along.
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