Unlike its lead canine, Dog spends an hour and a half without sinking its teeth into much.
Channing Tatum and Reid Carolin’s directorial debut follows Briggs (Channing Tatum), an Army Ranger struggling with lost identify and self-worth after a wartime brain injury sidelined him from combat. Out of options, Briggs begs his former commanding officer to recommend reinstatement after seeing him at a proto-wake for Sergeant Riley Rodriguez, a fallen team member.
Briggs is given a simple task to earn his lifeline: deliver Riley’s dog, Belgian Malinois and fellow Army Ranger Lulu, to Riley’s grieving family in Arizona before Sunday’s funeral. One problem: Lulu has devolved into a hyper-aggressive state, and no one can seem to calm her. Nonetheless, Briggs accepts, and the two set off down the west coast on a journey toward mutual recovery and understanding.
Billed as a buddy comedy between man and beast, the film is torn between a fun, family-friendly movie and a deeper, darker rumination on combat PTSD. It violently whips between the two, leaving both ends wanting. One minute, Lulu wolfs down Benadryl-laced hot dog after chewing Briggs’ beloved Bronco’s interior leather to shreds, and the next, Briggs darkly jokes about leaping to his death from a stalled-out prop plane and echoes the refrain “Rangers find a way to die.” There’s a good story in there, somewhere (a man finds recovery through a dog, c’mon), but it didn’t get teased out.
It’s entirely possible the split-identity issue wouldn’t be as glaring without the frequent and mostly unsuccessful side misadventures on the way to Arizona. On paper, these sound fun (Briggs goes out in Portland and quickly gets lost in caricatured wokeness, Lulu darts into an off-grid weed farm run by a kind psychic and faux-macho conscientious observer, the two cosplay as a blind veteran and his guide dog to get a fancy hotel room comped, etc.), but in practice, they’re just not that interesting.
The film would’ve been much better served had one, or two, or three of these detours been converted into more one-on-one time with Lulu (a very, very good girl) and Briggs. By far, its best moments are the quiet ones where the pair mutually work through their trauma, but there’s just not enough of them, presumably sacrificed for the goofier side plots.
There’s certainly something worthy of exploration in the nuances of military culture. Too often, it’s either “the military is a bunch of war criminals” or “our service members are 100 percent heroes and any word against them is a word against America.” Dog has something to say about that; for example, Lulu starts getting better the moment she leaves a Ranger facility, which speaks to a certain toxicity, but the film is certainly not antagonistic toward the military, and Briggs (and Lulu) often, and understandably, find comfort in their service and the sacrifice they’ve made.
But every time the film feels like it’s venturing into that territory, it reels back. Dog should have either leaned fully into the buddy comedy, gone for a PG family movie, and played up the earnestness, or truly went for a more reserved character study that focused on the two leads’ trauma. Alas, it decided to split the two, resulting in a tepid bark alongside its tepid bite.
