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

Robo Butt

• The film’s third act consists almost entirely of a giant robot fight. Towards its end, the good guy’s robot’s pants inexplicably fall to the ground, revealing an anatomically accurate robot tush.
  • With its pants now around its ankles, the robot falls to the ground, and the only way that the good guys can escape is by crawling out betwixt its cheeks.

Decapitation For Yucks

• The entire premise of the film is that a police officer and his dog are injured, and their viable body parts are then combined into a dog-man golem. In the scene, after the two are injured, they lay wrapped in bandages on an operating table as the doctor and nurse discuss cutting off the destroyed head of the police officer and the viable head of the dog and combining them. It’s done in the least gruesome way possible way, but conceptually, that’s pretty dark.

Sinful Living

• A new character was created for the film, that of Officer Knight’s girlfriend, Alice. She never speaks and is only shown in photographs and two brief flashbacks, but (while ambiguous enough that most kids probably won’t get it) the two lived together out of wedlock before Kight’s accident.
  • In fact, she moves out to live with a new boyfriend only days after Knight’s surgery.

WOKE REPORT

More Than Heads Were Swapped

• The male doctor who performs the surgery (and who appears only once in the books) is switched to a woman in the film for her only scene.

Snarky Superior Chick

• Pete The Cat briefly has a pink-haired female assistant who is a typical snarky pratt whose only purpose is to be superior to Pete.
  • Her part is so small that I forgot about her until looking at my notes.

Whitey Had A Dog and Its Head Popped Off

• The only white male in the film is Officer Knight, who gets killed in the film’s opening minutes and has his head surgically replaced with that of a dog.

The Cat’s In the Cradle

• Some might argue that Pete’s deadbeat dad is just another example in a long line of cinematic fathers being represented as worthless. However, I didn’t ding the Woke-O-Meter for it because his worthless father was used as a mirror to facilitate Pete’s redemptive arc and to prompt him into becoming a loving father himself.