Reviewed
by Lamar Kukuk
11/29/09
The
movie business needs stars. Sure, they're a great promotional platform
to get potential ticketbuyers to listen to your pitch, but more than that,
a true star can be expected to deliver a certain level of excellence necessary
to elevate some of the astonishingly bad screenplays that are greenlit.
Case in point: on the page, Old Dogs is one of those utterly
miserable family comedies where a workaholic learns to fall in line and
want a family like everyone else does/is supposed to. But it's got
a secret weapon in John Travolta, whose comic style relies on a certain
edge-of-his-seat mania that means no gag can be going so badly he can't
at least elicit a smile. Throw in Robin Williams, game enough for
anything that he makes a horrible role tolerable, and a movie that could
have been 90 minutes of pure hell instead becomes almost worthwhile.
Interspersing stretches of genuine hilarity with others where it simply
lays there like a dead fish, Old Dogs wastes the talent it's assembled
to a criminal degree. But once trapped in a theater with it, I couldn't
have been more glad they decided to sign on.
Charlie
(John Travolta) and Dan (Robin Williams) are best friends and sports marketing
geniuses whose boutique firm is on the verge of its' biggest account ever,
with a Japanese company whose executives will require special hand-holding
over the next few weeks to seal the deal. At the same time, Dan gets
a call from old flame Vicki (Kelly Preston), to whom he was married for
a few drunken hours 7 years earlier. He wants to reconnect, and meets
her for drinks. Turns out, she's got two kids conceived on that wild
night: Zach (Conner Rayburn) and Emily (Ella Bleu Travolta).
Vicki's about to spend two weeks in jail due to an environmental protest,
and after her best friend (Rita Wilson) ends up in the hospital and unable
to care for them, Dan agrees to babysit the kids he never knew he had.
Since his condo is adults-only, soon enough, they're all living with Charlie
and struggling to balance camping trips and tea parties with business meetings
and golf games with their potential clients. This is going to get
messy.
And
so it does, in ways that are occasionally inspired, like the kids spilling
the 50-something guys' pills and putting them back in the wrong order,
leading to a rash of random side-effects including Dan's loss of depth
perception on the golf course and Charlie developing the funniest facial
twitch I've ever seen. The disastrous trip to the zoo so much of
the ad campaign is built around delivers the expected laughs, and that
camping trip is fun thanks to insanely overcranked comic turns by Matt
Dillon and Justin Long. But they also point to Old Dogs' great
weakness, the fact that director Walt Becker (who worked with Travolta
on Wild Hogs, a wonderfully funny and sentimental
buddy comedy that's everything Old Dogs isn't) seems to have told
everyone to turn it up to 11 and then taken a nap for the rest of the shoot.
For Travolta, that works, because he's a man who knows no top to go over:
the more frantic Charlie gets, the funnier he is, and a running joke where
the aging ladies' man is deflated again and again by people's assumption
that he's the kids' grandfather is a hoot (never moreso than when one of
the kids dumps a drink in his lap and he has to cry out “It was an accident!”).
But there are horrors of overacting here as well, like Rita Wilson's shockingly
unfunny miming of having her hands smashed by a closed trunk and an utterly
awful sequence where the late Bernie Mac (the movie's release was delayed
twice due to tragedy, first Mac's death and then that of Travolta's young
son Jett) plays a puppeteer who hooks the guys up to some ridiculous sci-fi
device that allows Charlie to control Dan's movements while he has a tea
party with Emily. Seriously, what planet does that scene take place
on?
All
too often, movies like Old Dogs take for granted their target audience's
susceptibility to stories where successful people find greater meaning
in parenthood and forget to add any of that greater meaning (to see this
sort of thing done right, check out Jerry Maguire). The kids
here do pretty much nothing but set up punchlines, and because Dan's already
kind of a sad doormat when the movie begins, there's no opportunity for
him to change, just to let some kids run his life instead of his best friend.
Zach and Emily don't really come off as kids anyway, just wind-up toys
that alternate mischief with over-scripted bouts of vulnerability.
Poor Emily's stuck being the only little girl alive who loves Princesses,
tea parties, AND Superheroes, just so Dan can get dressed up in a Rocket
Man suit for The Big Climactic Gesture. Why Zach doesn't get the
superheroes, or at least the tea parties, is a question best posed to writers
David Diamond and David Weissman, who have crafted a list of Hilarious
Scenes and written the thinnest possible connective tissue to string them
all together.
That
a good third of those scenes actually are funny will make Old Dogs
a satisfying experience for most of the people who'd consider going to
see it. But make no mistake, this is a shaggy mutt indeed, and those
expecting characters, story, or even a 50/50 hit/miss percentage on the
jokes will be disappointed. John Travolta made Old Dogs to
have a chance to work with daughter Ella Bleu (who is cute in a role that
doesn't allow for much acting) and wife Kelly Preston, so I know he's not
sorry he gave this turkey his all. And neither am I: thanks
to the efforts of the movie's spirited cast, I have lived to tell the tale.
Proceed at your own risk. |
