'Strays': This raunchy story of a lost dog should just get lost
It takes a few utterances of the word "motherfucker," fired with the concussive rhythm of a machine gun, for you to realize Strays is not a kids' film. Lots of talking-animal comedies feature a smidge of potty humor aimed at adults, like Cat & Dogs, the Dr. Dolittle series, and Marmaduke. But it seems Strays aims to be The Happytime Murders — the raunchy puppet noir starring Melissa McCarthy — of animal movies, or perhaps Meet the Feebles, Peter Jackson's eye-poppingly weird satire of the Muppets.
Beyond the broad demographic of adults, it's difficult to know the intended audience of Josh Greenbaum's Strays, a noxious narrative pushing the boundaries of low taste and garbage humor.
Take a scene where Bug (Jamie Foxx), a foul-mouthed Boston Terrier, explains to Reggie (Will Ferrell) the benefits of being off leash. For one, anything you urinate on is yours; the camera cuts to them urinating on a street light. Secondly, you can hump whatever you want; the camera cuts to Bug making slow love with a dirty gray couch in an alley. Lastly, with the lens angled in a low close-up, Bug declares, "You are on your own." The montage doesn't merely prepare viewers for the new life Reggie will soon embark upon; it's a primer for the low-hanging comedy that powers, in the least potent sense of the word, the canine camaraderie geared toward, I guess, somebody out there.
Strays unleashes smut that falls flat.
When Strays begins, Reggie — one of those scraggly-faced Border Terriers seen in Anchorman and Something About Mary — has a seemingly perfect life. We see a dreamy slow-motion shot of him running through idyllic fields chasing a butterfly. Reggie's primary goal in life is making his owner Doug (Will Forte) happy. However, Reggie was originally adopted by Doug's girlfriend, and now that they've broken up, the bong-smoking, viciously mean Doug feels saddled with a dog he never wanted in the first place. Now, Doug takes his sad existence — a dilapidated house littered with beer cans and unidentifiable stains — out on Reggie by verbally abusing the pupper.
Because dogs can only see the good in people, Reggie thinks Doug loves him. (Reggie also hasn't met many other humans.) In fact, Reggie has taken to a new game called "fetch and fuck." Doug drives him off to faraway locales, usually in the middle of nowhere, throws a tennis ball and drives away. Reggie somehow makes his way back home only for Doug to blurt an expletive. Reggie's sincerity throughout these clearly abusive scenarios will make Strays a difficult watch for dog lovers — a demographic the film seems to aim toward but squarely misses.
Eventually, Doug drives Reggie all the way to the city, abandoning him in an alley. It's there he meets Bug, a cynical stray who takes Reggie under his wing. The naive Reggie is soon introduced to Bug's other friends: a Great Dane and canine unit dropout turned hospice therapy dog Hunter (Randall Park) and Australian Shepherd slash Insta model Maggie (Isla Fisher).
Some goodbyes should be forever.
For a time, Strays leaves you slack-jawed with discomfort. Take the moment Reggie meets Bug. The former is wandering alone down a dark alley with a tennis ball. He passes a couple of hounds who ask, "Have you ever been with an Afghan before?" Two bigger dogs corner him until Bug appears. Bug's defense mechanism is pretending to be a crazy tiny dog. He rants and raves, sprouting incomprehensibly dirty phrases like "tongue-fucking dead squirrels." It's sort of amazing, amid an ultra-sanitized theatrical landscape, to see dialogue like that make it from page to screen. But it soon wears thin.
Watching this raunchy comedy, written by Players co-creator Dan Perrault, requires an endless search to discover what's good about it. The best answer springs from the close relationship shared by the four canines. One of their first hangouts is called "scraps night," whereby they wait around bars and restaurants for humans to spill food. Even that swing for a heartwarming resonance lands flat when running through the sprinklers becomes an excuse to point out, though an extreme closeup, Hunter's huge member, which becomes a recurrent joke throughout the film. When humping garden gnomes turns into an opportunity for one of the dogs to make a quip about incest, that becomes yet another toothless recurrent gag.
At best, Hunter and Maggie open Reggie's eyes to the fact that Doug is abusive. That realization leads to Reggie asking his new friends to guide him back home for revenge: Reggie declares that he will bite Doug's dick off. And so begins a road trip that stretches this 90-min film into what feels like a languid, three-hour soak in every bodily fluid known to man.
Strays looks for love in all the wrong places.
During their journey, the dogs find increasingly outlandish hijinks: they eat 'shrooms, go on a gruesome killing spree, and help search for a lost Girl Scout, and as the dogs' adventure gets weirder, the comedy becomes more strained. This film wants so badly to be edgy, but it's just desperate. You feel the overeagerness to be cool in the tawdry needle drops of Fergie's "London Bridge" and Miley Cyrus's "Wrecking Ball," or when the script goes for gags about intersex eagles. We even meet a German Shepherd whose human named him Adolph in a sad bid for Nazi humor.
The voice acting is also hit or miss: Will Ferrell is pointedly earnest, not unlike his performance in Old School, and Jamie Foxx delivers each line with a confidence that very often imbues them with some sense of hilarity. The rest, such as Josh Gad, are pedestrian.
Worst yet, Strays angles to make larger statements about toxic relationships and the abuse of animals, but neither of these weighty subjects find any sort of depth. They're merely big bubble ideas reduced to a fine print as jokes about dicks, urine, and incest receive headline treatment from the trashy script. It rockets you not to crowd-pleasing vibes but uneasy squirms, not to memorable moments but to times you want to forget. By the end of Strays, you end up wishing it would just get lost.
Strays premieres in theaters Aug. 18.
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