Strays

Strays is the talking-dog film with the swearing left in. Reggie (Will Ferrell), a trusting little terrier, lives with Doug (Will Forte), a man who cannot stand him and keeps driving him further and further from home in the hope he will not come back. Reggie thinks this is a game. When he lands in the city he meets Bug (Jamie Foxx), a Boston terrier who has never had an owner and never wanted one, and two more strays, Maggie (Isla Fisher) and Hunter (Randall Park), and resolves to walk home and bite off a specific part of Doug. The tagline is “Go fetch yourself”. That is the film, and it is a decent one, funnier than it has any right to be for about forty minutes and then noticeably less.

The dogs are the reason to see it. Tim Orr shoots them at their own height in ordinary suburban daylight, so the film looks exactly like the wholesome ones it is mocking, and the animals are real animals with only their mouths worked over. A Great Dane in a plastic cone gazing into the lens is funny before anyone has said a word, and Greenbaum knows it, and holds the shot. Aaron Osborne gives Doug a house that looks like a student flat nobody moved out of, and the city the dogs pass through is scruffy enough to feel like somewhere a dog might live rather than a set a dog has been brought to.

Foxx does the heavy lifting. He gives Bug a rapid, confident, entirely unearned authority, the voice of a small dog who has decided he is a large one, and most of the film’s best lines are his. Ferrell plays Reggie as pure open-hearted stupidity, which suits the premise: the joke is that the sweetest creature in the film is the one plotting mutilation. Park makes Hunter’s nerves touching in a way the script does not quite ask for, and Fisher gets the least to do and does it well. Josh Gad turns up as a dog who narrates his own life in the voice of a hundred sentimental trailers, and Sofía Vergara voices a couch. The couch is one of the better characters.

We laughed hardest at the sequence in a field of mushrooms, where the four dogs eat something they should not and the film lets them be dogs whose brains have gone wrong rather than comedians in dog suits. It runs longer than a sensible editor would allow and is funnier for it. We laughed, and then we felt slightly ashamed, because the punchline was a dog doing something unrepeatable to a garden ornament, and we had known that was coming and laughed anyway. There is also a night of fireworks, seen from underneath, that is the one time the film takes the dogs’ fear seriously, and it lands.

The trouble is what the script by Dan Perrault does when it is not doing those things. The swearing is the punchline far too often, and a dog saying a rude word is funny the first time, mildly funny the fifth, and by the twentieth simply what the film sounds like. Three editors are credited, Greg Hayden, David Rennie and Sabrina Plisco, and the film still moves like a run of sketches with a road between them. Dara Taylor’s score swells in the broad, orchestral way of the films being parodied, which is the right idea, but it is asked to do it under every gag, and the gags stop noticing. The stretch between the mushrooms and the last twenty minutes is where we started checking how long was left.

Greenbaum’s previous film, Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar (2021), was daft and sincere at once, and the sincerity was the surprise. Strays has the sincerity too: the four of them plainly like each other, and the film likes dogs, their stupidity and their loyalty and their revolting habits, and says so without embarrassment. What it lacks is the invention. Babe and Homeward Bound are in its sights but it never quite aims; it borrows their shape and their light and then shouts over them.

It runs 93 minutes and carries a 15 certificate, which is the whole review in two numbers. Watch it at home, with a drink and someone who does not mind a poo joke, and do not under any circumstances mistake it for one of the films it is making fun of. The dogs, at least, were excellent, and none of them said a word.