Old Dogs is an 88 minute movie. The average human life is only about 40,839,120 minutes… Enough said.

The film focuses on two middle-aged friends who head a large marketing firm. Just as they are about to make the deal of their corporate careers, Dan [Robin Williams] learns that he has two kids, and winds up taking care of them for a week, much to the dismay of Charlie [John Travolta]. Hilarity, however, does not ensue.

In fact, the movie’s single greatest accomplishment is that it was so bad [both critically and commercially] that Disney scrapped its plans to make a Wild Hogs 2. More on that in a bit.

Robin Williams is a talented actor and an even more talented comedian. But you wouldn’t know that from watching this movie. Walt Becker, the man responsible for Wild Hogs, a film with an eerily similar name structure, seems to have extinguished every spark of inspiration Williams had; All of the eccentric quirks that make him fun to watch seem to have been systematically squashed in this film. Every time there’s a hint of humor, Becker cuts to something new, effectively killing any semblance of comedy. John Travolta also appears off his game, as he turns in an even less relatable, even less funny, middle-aged businessman. The only people in true comic form are the smaller characters, like Seth Green’s corporate sidekick or Matt Dillon’s sociopathic Boy Scout troupe leader. In a movie filled with minor characters, these two stood out as solid, if not actually funny.

An interesting fun fact about the film is that it was initially going to be 107 minutes and RATED R. It screened poorly, so they cut it down to 88 minutes and turned it into a PG family film. Well, a PG film. But I’m more interested in what the original film looked like, because I can’t imagine it could be worse than the version I saw. I understand that people look for different things in films. Maybe you like well-evolved inter-character dynamics, or perhaps a meaningful life statement that offers insight beyond the scope of the film. No matter what you’re criteria is you will not find it in this movie. Every scene is just filler, and flies past you at breakneck speed so you can’t even appreciate its emptiness until it’s over.

Probably the single worst aspect of the film is something you wouldn’t have guessed. It’s the editing. I timed a minute of the film and counted the number of cuts that were made. To give you a benchmark, an average scene in Avatar had 18 cuts in a minute. That’s about a cut every 3 seconds. How many did Old Dogs have you ask? 40. Say the alphabet out loud up to ‘E’. That’s about a second and a half, or the length of an average shot in Old Dogs.

The

problem with this style of editing is that it suggests to the viewer that there will be humor inherent in the speed of the cutting. Like jump cuts in a montage. Only, the cuts aren’t particularly funny, there are just a lot of them. In fact, because you are being bombarded by so many shots at such a high speed, it’s hard to find humor in any one of them. The movie’s overly fast pacing is its downfall. I have no doubt that if every shot of Robin Williams was extended by a few seconds, the movie would become significantly funnier. Any time something was about to get a laugh, *BLAM* there would be a cut to something entirely different. It’s as though somewhere in the process of making the film, someone forgot it was supposed to be a comedy. At least I think it was supposed to be a comedy. I really hope it wasn’t a drama.

I watched Old Dogs and took diddly squat out of the experience. I just spent the whole 88 minutes feeling like a laugh was just around the next bend in the river. It was this promise of humor that kept me watching. Old Dogs wants to believe it’s a comedy, but you’d be hard pressed to find anything substantially funny in the film.

The DVD special features were depressing. Not just because there were so few of them, but also because they gave me an insight into the creative process behind the film; Like I said… depressing. The blooper reel had all the good ol’ Robin Williams antics I had craved throughout the movie. It’s nice to know that he’s still got it, despite what the film suggests. I questioned the deleted scenes, as they were no more expendable than any other scene in the film. There was also a shameless plug for Blu Ray from the stars of Disney’s The Suite Life, but the real gold was the audio commentary: the director and writers talking about the process of making the film. I only made it through the first half, but what I heard was very informative. Listening to these guys talk, you’d think they had created a masterpiece. It’s great insight into how not to write and direct a film.

In conclusion, Old Dogs on DVD costs $30. The average person will only make about $2 million over the course of their life… Enough said.

Movie Grade: D-
DVD Features Grade: C+ (only for Robin Williams on the blooper reel)
Overall Grade: D+