Good Boy (2003) Review

Thirty-five years after Jim Henson launched his career with Rowlf the Dog, daughter Lisa teams up with MGM for her own movie about talking pooches.

Liam Aiken and Hubble in Good Boy (2003) (Courtesy of IMDB)

As Jim Henson proved beginning in the late 1960s with Rowlf the Dog, Kermit the Frog and the rest of the Muppets gang, audiences are willing to forgive any manner of artifice when it comes to talking animals as long as the heart and soul of the story and characters are genuine.

More recently, two men - Australian filmmaker George Miller and northern California wizard John Lasseter - have upped the ante of this principle with Babe and the Pixar comedies A Bug's Life and Finding Nemo. Even though spectacular computer generated special effects power these efforts, their success can still ultimately be attributed to storyline, clever voice casting and whatever the talking animal world's equivalent to the TV industry's "Q factor" bell weather is.

In Good Boy!, the choice of Matthew Broderick, Delta Burke, Brittany Murphy, Carl Reiner and Donald Faison (Scrubs) as the voices of the five leading canines is adequately inspired, especially Murphy as the nervous Italian greyhound Nelly. However, first-time director John Robert Hoffman is unable to properly finesse the outrageous storyline about a master race of dogs from outer space, relying instead on a few too many "poop" jokes to create a film that is never more than workmanlike and fails to approach the breezy cohesiveness of others in its ilk such as Dr. Dolittle and Look Who's Talking.

Based on an informal straw poll conducted by FilmStew at the film's grandiose family premiere in west Los Angeles complete with generous giveaways, midway-style games and food catered by trendy L.A. eatery Patina, the audience most likely to enjoy the film is seven to ten-year-old boys, as they are happy to forgive the film's inconsistencies. For the rest of the people planning to traipse to this extensively promoted film - parents and younger kids - there are mild moments of both amusement and boredom.

Adapted from the story "Dogs from Outer Space" by Zeke Richardson, Good Boy! focuses on the desire of thirteen-year-old only child Owen Baker (Liam Aiken) for a dog of his own. As part of a deal with his home renovation obsessed parents (Kevin Nealon, Molly Shannon), Owen finally gets his chance, but with much more than he bargained for when the dog he adopts turns out to be an emissary of an intergalactic breed of master pooches.

There are minor glitches with the storyline, such as the fact that Kevin Nealon's role as the dad is completely superfluous. It would in fact have been better to have Aiken living alone with his divorced mom, Shannon, to better frame his alienation and loner status. But the real problem is the absence of that magic Miller, Lasseter or Disney touch needed to meld something like this into an all ages romp.

Molly Shannon in Good Boy (2003) (Courtesy of IMDB)

During the October 9th edition of Jimmy Kimmel Live, filmmaker Quentin Tarantino suggested that 12-year-old boys an girls should buy a ticket to Good Boy! at their neighbor-hood multiplex for the purposes of sneaking into an R-rated showing of Kill Bill: Volume 1, as he was convinced that they would love his movie. Tarantino went on to explain that as a child, he himself got his formative movie education by similarly clocking in at the box office for something like Bugsy Malone and then making a beeline for the theater showing Carrie.

Another interesting sidebar is the fact that MGM, on the film's official web site and elsewhere, is going to great lengths to point out to prospective pet owners that they should "carefully research when choosing a dog" and only buy from "reputable breeders." A few years ago, there was much consternation yet again among Dalmatian aficionados when a throng of young moviegoers convinced their parents to adopt a spotted pet after seeing 102 Dalmatians. With Good Boy!, thirteen-year-old actor Liam Aiken (Road To Perdition, Sweet November, Stepmom) demonstrates once again that he is an adept practitioner of unaffected and well-measured on screen acting. But the real behind the scenes stars of the movie, shot north of the border in Vancouver, are of course the army of animal wranglers just beyond the camera's range.

Shot for a modest $18 million, Good Boy! is part of the recent overall resurgence of MGM Studios, which moved into spanking new high rise headquarters in Century City earlier this year and has been getting back to the business of making movies rather than balancing Kirk Kerkorian's checkbook. With this film and other recent efforts such as Uptown Girls, Agent Cody Banks and next year's Coach with Cedric The Entertainer, the studio seems determined reclaim a piece of the family entertainment pie. And that can only be a good thing for parents struggling to pull their kids away from Nintendo, Playstation and Game Boy.