Her distressed yelping is sobering, even when Briggs is trying to rush his way into a threesome. The film doesn’t balk at these ideas, which usually take the form of accusations against Briggs, but rather, it uses them to highlight how one-tracked the character is when it comes to getting back to the war that defines his identity.īriggs is also one-tracked about getting laid whenever Dog decides to become a raunchy sex comedy with a dash of orientalism, but no matter what strange new form it takes, Lulu’s presence along the journey keeps yanking Briggs back to uncomfortable memories. However, almost everyone he runs into on the way to Rodriguez’s funeral seems to have one opinion or another about racism, masculinity, and the military industrial complex. Briggs doesn’t have any larger concerns or opinions other than getting back into the field, and he barely seems worried about the lasting effects of the visible scars on his head and torso.
It inadvertently reveals what’s actually being discussed beneath the surface when characters bond wistfully over deployment.Įven though Carolin and Tatum drag Briggs and Lulu through a number of eccentric scenarios (featuring side characters ripped from various mid-2000s stoner comedies), their framing of Briggs soon reveals what kind of story they’re attempting, by contrasting it with the kinds of stories everyone around him wants to tell. The disconnect often borders on nonsensical, but in a way that cracks open the reality of euphemisms being used to paint over bloodshed in bright hues of red, white, and blue. Briggs and his fellow soldiers all discuss it with a laid-back, joking cadence, but what they talk about is always deeply disturbing. For the most part, that’s the vibe Dog gives off when it comes to war. The handler in question, Rodriguez (Eric Urbiztondo), was one of Briggs’ unit mates, and while he didn’t die in combat, his death from an apparent drunk-driving accident hints at a darker post-war story, on which Dog never actually touches, and which its characters only mention in the form of casual banter. It’s as much the serious and uber violent Max as it is its inexplicably comedic, Disney Channel-esque sequel Max 2: White House Hero.īriggs, a man trying to get back to his old post in Syria despite a lingering brain injury, finally has the opportunity when his commanding officer, Jones (Luke Forbes), orders him to drive the aggressive war dog Lulu to her handler’s funeral. On the other hand, the fact that these two opposing forces keep brushing up against each other - sometimes intentionally, other times very much not - is what makes it so fascinating and hilarious. On one hand, describing its malformed thematic gravitas is a disservice to how light-hearted it tries to be.
However, as the film begins to take outlandish turns into sketch comedy territory, it occasionally offers a peek behind this façade, at the real scars of war - both those experienced by soldiers like Briggs (Tatum), and those they inflict on other people. Dog starts out similarly, with characters whose defining trait is having been to war together, but whose interactions all conform to American cinema’s straightforward military “type,” with broad machismo standing in for real and nuanced humanity. At the risk of making their human subjects too flawed, fallible, or even distasteful, they sever them from perspectives on surrounding places, people, and experiences (largely in the Middle East), turning them into broad, dimensionless cutouts of jingoistic heroism.
These films take understandably somber approaches, but they’re also blinkered - like many Hollywood movies about war trauma tend to be - explorations of the experiences of American soldiers in a way that feels disconnected from the big picture of the war itself. Their rightness or wrongness hardly matters when the result is not only this sincere, but so downright bizarre that it manages to deconstruct an entire Hollywood subgenre.Ĭo-directed by Tatum and Magic Mike writer Reid Carolin (and co-written by Carolin and Brett Rodriguez), Dog bears resemblance to other recent war dramas about soldiers and their Belgian Shepherds, like Max and Megan Leavey. It’s a blast from start to finish, whether for the right reasons or the wrong ones. However, it’s both funnier and more shocking than its filmmakers seem to realize (not to mention, filled with the kind of tonal whiplash reserved for so-bad-it’s-good midnight cinema). Army Ranger tasked with chauffeuring a traumatized military canine, presents itself as a feel-good road trip comedy with occasional animal melodrama and sprinkles of wartime commentary. Dog, which stars Channing Tatum as a former U.S.
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