Dog Gone – Film Review

After a young man and his beloved dog are separated on the Appalachian Trail, he and his father must begin a desperate search to find him before it’s too late.

Sometimes it’s hard to talk about movies that are based on a true story because it can be hard to determine what’s real and what’s fictional, and because of that, it’s hard to say that something seems off it it really did happen. Regardless, Stephen Herek‘s Dog Gone is one of the worst films of the year already.

It’s still early on in the year, but I wouldn’t be surprised if by December, this film would still be sitting among the bottom of my ranking list. I’m not usually the biggest fan of these family flicks but if they’re written well enough and they manage to make me feel all warm and fuzzy inside, then I’ll admit to it.

I’ll own up to getting teary-eyed at another dog movie – Marley & Me – but that’s not the kind of movie this is. Dog Gone is some sort of strange amalgamation of a coming-of-age rom-com of sorts mixed with a family adventure movie between a teenage boy, his dad, and his dog.

There are probably going to be tons of people who fall in love with this movie, but I just couldn’t. Simply having an adorable dog in the movie isn’t enough to win me over, despite owning a dog. Any great movie needs to have a great script and sadly, this film just doesn’t have that. It’s not even all that entertaining, either.

There are a couple of scenes between Rob Lowe and Johnny Berchtold that managed to tug at the heart-strings and the film does have an admittedly emotional ending, but the rest of the journey is mind-numbingly boring and is filled to the brim with cringe-inducing jokes that won’t make anybody laugh. It’s a film that’s made for families of all ages and yet I’ll bet you won’t see anybody laughing at the humor present here.

This whole thing just felt like a humongous, lazy cash-grab. The filmmakers knew that people were going to eat this movie up because it has a cute dog in it so they didn’t try hard enough to tell a legitimately entertaining, heart-warming story. It’s a ridiculously corny, sloppily written, and extremely poorly paced-mess. Not to mention the fact that it looks like it was made on a college student’s budget.

Dog Gone is a hugely lazy family comedy that suffers from poor pacing, an all-too-familiar story, and an impressively bland script that goes nowhere.