Thursday 24 July 2014

Review of Pudsey the Dog: The Movie (2014)

Pudsey the dog, for those who are unaware (such as me, for example), is a Border Collie, Bichon Frise, Chinese Crested powderpuff cross, as Wikipedia helpfully informs me. Certainly he's small, has a white coat, is kinda cute, and he won the TV show Britain's Got Talent because, I gather, he can get on his hind legs and turn around.

I say "I gather" because rather unhelpfully I have never watched Britain's Got Talent, and this display of craftsmanship is the only notable thing Pudsey does in the film, unless having a CGI jaw eerily tacked on so as to divulge in the audience the droll witticisms of David Walliams, who voices Pudsey, counts as a talent, which I don't think it does, since Pudsey and not Walliams won the show. Anyway, this is an admission of guilt; I am perhaps the least qualified person to review this film, knowing nothing about anything that helped spawned it, and not even being aware of Pudsey as a cultural phenomenon until I watched the trailer. If it makes you feel any better, from the title I expected this film to be about that yellow charity mascot. I watched this film because, simply, it was a hot summer's day and me and a friend ducked into the nearest available film. Mistress Fate, or The Gods, or perhaps some other deity dictated that it was going to be "Pudsey the Dog: The Movie" (as opposed to "Pudsey: The Movie", or even "Pudsey the Movie: The Dog").

I'm digressing here, I know, so let me cut straight to the cold hard facts; this is an abominable movie. It feels rushed, stale and derivative, the script hangs by a thread, the characters are barely formed, and some of the acting from the children is atrocious (I don't blame them; I imagine director Nick Moore's attention was on other things during filming, such as getting Pudsey to stay still when necessary, and hence the kids were overlooked).

There is no plot, merely a collection of scenes seemingly constructed around the lovable antics of Pudsey. Well, I say lovable, because I got the impression that was how he was meant to be taken, but in all honesty I couldn't find much to love about him. Indeed, after the opening scene where he trashes a film set and runs away (perhaps a metaphor for the making of this film...?), I found no real reason to root for Pudsey- to do so would be tantamount to endorsing wanton chaos and destruction.

As voiced by Walliams, the range of his interests runs from sausages to making loaded barbs, and uttering pointless observations regarding the current circumstances ("I tried to warn you!") despite the fact that nobody, literally not a single person in the entire world, can understand him, for he is burdened with the existence of a canine.

Oh, but how cruel I am being. This is a kids' film, after all, although I'm going to whisper to you the fact that none of the children in my screen laughed once. What I will say, instead, was that I approached this film in a mood of jollity and found it absolutely hilarious. Not because of any particular funny lines (Paul Rose's screenplay is the equivalent of a sneeze), or comic setups, but because the film is weird. Plain strange. Near-Lynchian, in places, in fact, and there's even some misguided subtext regarding eldest daughter Molly (Izzy Meikle-Small) of the family that Pudsey ends up with. Upon having moved to a farm and seeing a farmhand she's interested in, her first words are "that's a big cucumber".

Hm.

A later moment comes when Molly tries her hand at milking the cows, with the farmhand's guidance, and a rather unlikely spurt of white milk lands right in her eye, to which she yells "that's gross!"

A hidden treatise on the pitfalls of early sexual maturity, or lazy physical comedy? I leave that entirely up to you to decide.

There's even some approximation of fun to be had with John Session's dastardly Mr Thorne, who plans to bulldoze down the house he literally just sold to the family (headed by Jess Hyne's matriarch Gail), and build a fancy shopping centre, or something, on top of it- that old pitfall. It's nearly worth the vacuous waste of 87 minutes just to hear him utter the line "you scared away my Faustus!", referring to his cat, who runs away after Pudsey terrifies him into submission and leaves her a broken cat.

(Sure, it was meant to be lighthearted comedic play on the old feud between cats and dogs, but I saw what you were doing Pudsey, you cad.)

Other noteworthy moments of bafflement come when Pudsey hallucinates a bunch of sausages dancing in a forest in a sequence reiminscent of Walerian Borowczyk's "The Beast", and the moment the film tactfully implies that the children's father died ("Do you even know how to fix a tyre?"- "Dad did.")

What am I doing? I cannot, and am not, recommending this film, because it's terrible. Sure, I laughed, but I entered it in a good mood and read things into it that likely no other audience member will. I found it strange, baffling and misguided in equal measure.

Don't watch it. But if you enjoyed reading this review, then you have some sense of the kind of fun I had with the film; that comes with the disclaimer that you now have no need to watch the film. Go and watch Boyhood, or literally anything else that has ever been made, instead.

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