A Dog's Journey: A slightly milder tail-wag

A Dog's Journey (2019) • View trailer 
3.5 stars. Rated PG, for brief peril and mild rude humor
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 5.17.19

Utterly shameless.

Relentlessly manipulative and sentimental.

Also adorable and poignant.

CJ (Kathryn Prescott) remains oblivious to the fact that best friend Trent (Henry Lau)
has been sweet on her since they were 10 years old; her far more perceptive dog,
Molly, wonders why they don't simply lick each other and get it over with.

Author W. Bruce Cameron has made quite the cottage industry of his Dog books, with two core novels having blossomed into an additional four one-offs, half a dozen young reader Puppy Tales, and an entirely separate story trilogy, all during the past decade.

Director Lasse Hallström transformed 2010’s A Dog’s Purpose into a cinematic charmer two years ago, with a writing assist from Cameron (and rather a lot of co-scripters). He and most of the same writing team have collaborated anew on the script adaptation of that book’s sequel, A Dog’s Journey, this time placing their faith in indefatigable, Emmy Award-winning TV director Gail Mancuso (everything from Scrubs and 30 Rock to Man with a Plan and Modern Family).

Her touch doesn’t quite hit the sweet spot of compelling pathos and gentle humor that has characterized Hallström’s career — notably in Chocolat and The Cider House Rules — and gave his Dog its special radiance. He has an affinity for heightened reality that makes it seem not only credible, but reasonable. Mancuso is a sitcom director: Her approach is broader, with supporting characters who feel more like exaggerated burlesques than actual people, and a more obvious reliance on comedy (particularly with respect to canine one-liners). 

This film therefore leans in the direction of TV’s fast-paced artifice, rather than the naturalistic verisimilitude of its predecessor. The emotional content isn’t as authentic, and a few elements have a whiff of calculated contrivance.

In fairness, that’s also because Cameron’s sequel novel isn’t nearly as fresh as its predecessor. It’s hard to pull off the same clever trick twice.

The gimmick is that Cameron’s alpha canine is a regenerative soul that remembers all of its past lives and responsibilities. This begins in the first film when 8-year-old Ethan gets his first dog: a rambunctious Golden Retriever puppy dubbed Bailey, who becomes his best friend. Dog’s lives being so cruelly brief, Bailey soon leaves a heartbroken Ethan behind; ah, but after a series of subsequent bodies and owners, Bailey is reunited with an older Ethan (Dennis Quaid), now as a Australian Shepherd/St. Bernard cross.

Shazam!: Power failure

Shazam! (2019) • View trailer 
Two stars. Rated PG-13, and quite generously, for scary fantasy violence, intense action and relentless mental cruelty
By Derrick Bang

There’s an old parable about three blind men encountering an elephant for the first time.

“It’s a snake,” says the first, having felt the trunk.

With the eager help of Freddy (Jack Dylan Grazer, left), who imaginatively suggests a
series of potential powers, the newly christened Shazam (Zachary Levi) discovers
that — among other things — he can shoot powerful lightning bolts from his fingers.

“No, it’s a spear,” opines the second, awed by the long, sharp tusk.

“It’s definitely a tree,” insists the third, unable to wrap his arms around one of the huge legs.

Scripters Henry Gayden and Darren Lemke — and, I’m certain, a sizable number of uncredited “sweeteners” — are the blind men, and this film is their elephant.

Shazam! feels like it was “written” by half a dozen people — one of whom is a sadist — working independent of each other. Apparently the resulting pages then were jammed together randomly, with no attempt to integrate tone, characterization or (God forbid) plot continuity.

And, hey presto! That’s how you get a movie as inept, haphazard and insufferably stupid as this one.

Newbie horror director David F. Sandberg (Lights Out, Annabelle: Creation) brings nothing to the party, and how could he? He has no meaningful template, from which to construct anything remotely artistic.

This Frankenstein’s monster of a flick is best described as Big (the 1988 Tom Hanks comedy) meets television’s Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, with the intelligence of the latter. Adults are advised to steer well clear, and I’m pretty sure even children will curl their lips with disgust.

When superhero movies go bad, they go very bad.

You’d think Warner Bros. would have learned, after 2011’s equally atrocious handling of Green Lantern, that the “Oh, wow; aren’t these powers cool?!” approach to these stories doesn’t work. At all.

Mind you, there’s nothing wrong with humor; indeed, a certain degree of smirky self-awareness is essential. But too much disrespects the nobility of these modern mythic characters, who (for the most part) deserve a measure of reverence. They’re not cartoons.

Gayden and Lemke treat this character — who dates back to 1939 (!) — as if he were a 5-minute Saturday Night Live sketch. Trouble is, this film runs a butt-numbing 132 minutes.