An alternative title for stray (now streaming on Amazon Prime Video) could be Look who’s saying F… now. It is the touching story of a scruffy little dog who speaks with the voice of Will Ferrell and dreams of returning home so he can gnaw on the gonads of the owner who abandoned him. You can feel like your heart is about to burst, right? Director Josh Greenbaum Continues His Comedy About People Will Laugh at Anything During a Global Pandemic Barb and Star go to Vista Del Mar with this crude, nasty, incredibly R-rated, and shamelessly scatological talking animal adventure that eventually broke through my limits like a muscular Rottweiler current into a snowbank. I’m better than this, you’re better than this, we’re ALL better than this, but it’s also okay if I, you, and we all laugh out loud while watching it.
missing: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The essence: Reggie (Ferrell) is a Border Terrier, one of those absurdly photogenic little dogs that exists to nip at a child’s heels, chasing a tennis ball for hours on sunny Saturday afternoons. So it’s even more tragic that Reggie ended up with Doug (Will Forte), a careless, unemployed serial masturbator who doesn’t love his dog or himself or life or existence or anything, really. Doug’s ex-girlfriend loved Reggie, and when she finally realized she left Doug, he kept the dog simply out of spite. Reggie doesn’t understand any of this; he interprets Doug’s abuse as love and has therefore pledged his heart to this angry, self-hating loser. How devoted is Reggie? He thinks Doug’s multiple attempts to abandon him are a game, which Reggie wins every time he manages to track his scent home from various distant locations. The poor pup doesn’t realize that he is in a relationship that makes him The bed on fire It looks like a Hallmark romantic comedy.
Now, we could translate Reggie’s codependency as a symptom of being a stereotypically loyal dog, and we wouldn’t be far wrong. But we’ll soon learn that such naivety is not inherent in all canines, at least in this film. Exasperated by Reggie’s fierce devotion and angry that the pup accidentally broke his favorite pipe, Doug drives a few hours to a town, drops him off in a vacant lot, and speeds away from him. And now Reggie is the dog equivalent of a fish out of water, a situation that is remedied by Bug (Jamie Foxx), a hardened street Boston Terrier who teaches him the Way of the Strays, which is a phrase Yo invented, not the movie. It involves claiming your territory by urinating on things, knowing where you can get a good slice of fallen pizza, and things like that. They befriend an Australian shepherd named Maggie (Isla Fisher) and a Great Dane named Hunter (Randall Park), whose relationship with her Cone of Shame is like Linus’s with his security blanket. The four dogs bond as a pack when they get drunk on garbage water and find charming inanimate objects to ride.
It’s probably not worth mentioning the romantic tension between Maggie and Hunter, evident by what’s happening with Hunter’s little red rocket down there, which is no small feat at all (I mean, he’s a Great Dane after all). . It’s probably also not worth noting that Bug has a crush on a couch he routinely desecrated during his time as a family pet, the details of which are later revealed in a tear-soaked flashback. But I’m pointing these things out here anyway, as examples of this movie’s kind of comedy, which is on the level of a squat toilet. Bug, Hunter, and Maggie seem a little smug when Reggie tells them his backstory and how he believes Doug reciprocates his unconditional love. Then they tell him the truth: poor Reggie is in an abusive relationship. In light of this harsh reality, Bug, Hunter and Maggie vow, against all odds, to help Reggie make the long, arduous journey home so he can bite Doug’s cock off.
What movies will it remind you of?: Babe: Pig in the city, Back home, Look who’s talking nowhe Marmaduke with Owen Wilson, sausage party and, perhaps for obvious reasons, Garbage collectors.
Performance value Looking Audience: Reggie is a naïve dog who’s sort of a canine version of Buddy the Elf, and while this is something Ferrell can do in his sleep, the trick is, at least in this context, pretty fun.
Memorable dialogue: Reggie envies what Doug loves most: “Sometimes I wish I were a penis!”
Sex and skin: Does the erection of a Great Dane or a stray dog riding a garden gnome count?
Our opinion: stray It’s vulgar and stupid, obsessed with poop and vomit, crudely crafted, and apparently written by and for prepubescent kids to sneak peek at when their parents aren’t paying attention. Their visual acuity is hindered by the limitations of working with a primary cast composed of trained animals. It’s frequently stomach-churning, and the most disgusting scenes tend to linger like the last drunk leaving the party. For a while, he didn’t amuse me. Then I was struck by the poignant way Greenbaum handled the harrowing stories of how some of these dogs became strays, which skewed the film’s disgust factor from 95 percent to, well, about 94 percent.
AND so, The needle drops on Miley Cyrus’ ‘Wrecking Ball’ during the movie’s big climactic sequence, and I roared and laughed and let it all out, wiped some tears from my eyes and felt good about it. It happens: sometimes you are surprised by a slab of childish and stupid comedy and have no choice but to submit to it while your better judgment and notions of good taste quickly swirl into the trash.
Before that, stray I found it an almost tolerable parody of family movie and revenge movie tropes underpinned by a clunky set of cognitive dissonance jokes about cute dogs doing ugly things. It indulges many traveling comedy clichés, you know, the inevitable scenes in which the protagonists accidentally take hallucinogenic drugs, are imprisoned, etc. (I should point out that the narrative tricks recently employed by Book Club: The Next Chapter – or was 80 for Brady? I can’t distinguish these things anymore). But every once in a while, an inspired ending shows up to save things, pushing them from marginal to visible, and in this case, almost maybe probably endearing, because what kind of j-hole doesn’t reach for the well? -Being lost dogs? No one is going to accuse the film of being a thoughtful examination of physical and emotional abuse, or a tender story about outcasts finding strength and affirmation in their new friendships. But it could inspire a healthy, cleansing laugh, something you wouldn’t expect from a movie that’s essentially about dogs sniffing each other’s hindquarters.
Our call: I liked this stupid movie and I’m not going to apologize for it. TRANSMIT IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic living in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
