Dog

It’s rare in cin­e­ma that you’ll get some­one so will­ing and able to lever­age their nat­ur­al charis­ma in the name of their art as the actor Chan­ning Tatum does with such scin­til­lat­ing reg­u­lar­i­ty. The upshot of that high­ly spe­cif­ic – and gen­er­ous – mode of per­for­mance is that Tatum doesn’t real­ly do char­ac­ters in the tra­di­tion­al sense of the term. What we have instead are iter­a­tions of the per­ceived Tatum per­sona – the louche, mis­chie­vous, dry­ly com­ic Amer­i­can ras­cal who owns a set of rip­pling back mus­cles that are big enough to slalom down.

It’s this com­plete com­fort with the camera’s unflinch­ing gaze that pow­ers the film Dog, in which Tatum stars as ex-marine ranger Jack­son Brig­gs, and he also co-directs in col­lab­o­ra­tion with his erst­while Mag­ic Mike pro­duc­er, Reid Car­olin. The sto­ry tem­plate is a feisty mon­grel of the clas­sic mis­matched bud­dy road movie, and the ​“falling-in-love-with-ini­tial­ly-prob­lem­at­ic-pet” sub-genre, and on the mod­est terms it sets for itself it mas­sive­ly over-delivers.

The mutt of the title is Lulu, a hulk­ing Bel­gian Mali­nois with sav­agery in her blood­stream, the result of var­i­ous tours of duty as a war dog. She must accom­pa­ny Brig­gs on a 1,500 mile schlep across the east coast of the US to attend the funer­al of her han­dler who slammed his car into a tree. Dam­aged by the trau­ma of con­flict, and appar­ent­ly unable to re-adjust to civil­ian life, Lulu (or is that Brig­gs?) even­tu­al­ly has a date with the vet’s nee­dle – but maybe, just maybe, her ever-avun­cu­lar chauf­feur can tame the beast while also deal­ing with his own reg­u­lar seizures, the result of a brain injury incurred while on active duty.

It’s a sto­ry we’ve seen a hun­dred times before from every con­ceiv­able angle, yet what places Dog in a high­er tier of such poten­tial­ly vanil­la fare is that care and atten­tion has been placed on more than cul­ti­vat­ing the cen­tral rela­tion­ship. Brig­gs’ own inabil­i­ty to see a way out of the pri­vate hell of penury and accept his sta­tus as an invalid shines a sub­tle light on America’s ​“hump-’em-and-dump-’em” atti­tude towards its vet­er­ans. Yet Dog wears its pol­i­tics light­ly, nev­er descend­ing to out­right cri­tique and is also quick to show­case the pride, val­ue and cama­raderie of life in the military.

This mag­nan­i­mous tone, where the film is com­fort­able to take gen­tle, well-aimed pot­shots at both sides of the polit­i­cal divide, serves to bol­ster the over­all atmos­phere of unyield­ing charm. Its episod­ic nar­ra­tive, too, some­times strays from the beat­en path, court­ing a cliché and then sud­den­ly turn­ing away, or sub­vert­ing it. There are numer­ous moments where all the sign­posts point towards a sac­cha­rine dirty bomb, and thank­ful­ly, the film sel­dom allows those to detonate.

Hang­ing out with Tatum in full cheeky pat­ter mode (cf Mag­ic Mike) for 90 min­utes is plea­sur­able enough, but Dog also comes with some wel­come Hitch­cock­ian bag­gage where Lulu who, akin to the plot of Samuel Fuller’s sem­i­nal 1982 racist pet movie, White Dog, has been trained to car­ry out spe­cif­ic tasks, includ­ing attack­ing peo­ple in mid­dle-east­ern garb and just bit­ing the faces off of any­one who appears antag­o­nis­tic towards her. This omnipresent sense of hair-trig­ger vio­lence lurks at the base of what is osten­si­bly a cheery fam­i­ly com­e­dy. And it kin­da rules.

If this film had come out in the 1980s or ​’90s, you can’t help but feel it would’ve been a crit­i­cal and com­mer­cial smash. Now, it’ll like­ly be lost in the expand­ing slur­ry of visu­al media that – a bit like Lulu – is just search­ing for some­one to care for and under­stand her.

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