A Dog’s Journey
2 stars
Director: Gail Mancuso
Stars: Dennis Quaid, Marg Helgenberger, Betty Gilpin, Josh Gad, Kathryn Prescott
Duration: 108 mins
Class: PG
KRS Releasing Ltd

A Dog’s Journey is a direct sequel to 2017’s A Dog’s Purpose, and the third film adaptation from the book trilogy by W. Bruce Cameron (the middle one is A Dog’s Way Home, featuring different characters, whose film adaptation was released earlier this year).

Bailey the Dog – aka Boss Dog (voiced by Josh Gad) – is living out his last years on a farm with his beloved humans Ethan and Hannah (Dennis Quaid and Marg Helgenberger). Sharing the house is their toddler-age granddaughter CJ, and daughter-in-law Gloria (Betty Gilpin) who cannot get over the loss of her husband, Ethan and Hannah’s son.

When Gloria decides to move to the city with CJ, Ethan and Hannah are heartbroken, and as Bailey reaches the end of his life, Ethan makes him promise that he will somehow find CJ and protect her as she is growing up.

The screenplay consists of some terribly clichéd dialogue

Cue an hour and 45 minutes of merciless heartstring-tugging as, hammering home the film’s message that some friendships transcend lifetimes, Bailey is reincarnated multiple times. And with each incarnation he (at times she is a she, but still sounds like Josh Gad) he miraculously ends up finding CJ over the years as she turns 11, then becomes a teenager and finally a young adult in New York trying to make it as a singer.

Seemingly built on the belief that having cute dogs on the screen for a film’s entire running time will suffice, the screenplay – which took four writers to put together, including author Cameron himself – consists of some terribly clichéd dialogue and improbable plotlines. It totally ignores character depth and a decent narrative, and throws in issues such as Gloria’s depression and alcoholism, CJ’s abuse at the hands of one boyfriend, her friend’s brush with cancer and the like for no other reason than to stretch out the plot.

We barely have time to register what is going on, before we are goaded us into sympathising even more with the characters and their tribulations as they go through the motions of happiness, heartbreak, tragedy and triumph.

Even the very young members of the audience will see through this obvious manipulation; especially when we are subjected to a plethora of overtly-cutesy scenes of the respective dogs running in slow motion to doggy heaven in an impossibly golden field of corn.

I have often said that I dislike being churlish about films like this whose sole purpose is to provide a couple of hours of innocent feel-good entertainment. But here it must be said that the manipulation of emotions is a bit too much. Moreover, there are too many instances of really lazy writing – that CJ almost recognises Bailey in dog incarnation number three (or possibly four) because he merely offers her his paw is ridiculous. While the dogs thinking extremely articulate thoughts throughout, not recognising simple words such as ‘paw’, underlines the inconsistency.

Unsurprisingly, the dogs, each one of them, is remarkably cute and their antics while away the time effectively.  Their adult counterparts, in the meantime, do their best with the paper-thin characters they have to work with. Kathryn Prescott makes the biggest impact, projecting some genuine emotion as the young woman who had to grow up with no father, a distant, unfeeling mother and make her own way in the world with only her dogs for real company. Henry Lau is sympathetic and her best friend since childhood Trent.

For the most part Gilpin avoids the stereotypical behaviour associated with drunken characters, while Quaid and Helgenberger add a little gravitas, despite the dodgy old-age makeup they are saddled with at the end.

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