A Dog’s Purpose is a dog reincarnation movie which basically means its like Marley & Me only with about five dead dogs to cry over. It’s about as manipulative as a dead dog movie can be in that any movie that’s about a dog that dies is inherently manipulative. We love our pets, we don’t want to see them die… a movie about dead pets is therefor designed to tug at our emotions. We probably don’t need to see five different dogs die in the same movie… but, then it occurs to me that saying you don’t want to feel sad in a movie about a dead dog is like saying you don’t want to see wars in the stars when seeing a Star Wars movie.
So, yeah, I saw this movie and I was sad five or six times over the death of a dog who starts his journey in 1961 and lives and died multiple times until he reaches 2017 (I guess). Every life he’s a different breed and has a new family… so the movie is kind of like five mostly independent human short stories glued together by the presence of a dog.
I had two big problem with this movie. The first is that the trailer basically spoils the entire movie by revealing each life and, more importantly, the final life and a single critical point. So if you’ve seen the trailer, the movie becomes this kind of sick waiting game where the goal is to get to the point the dog croaks and you get the next life where you just wait for the dog to die again. Probably not the best way to experience the movie.
The second issue is that the dog narrates his own story (via the voice of Josh Gadd). There’s probably a great cut of this movie where we just watch a series of slice-of-life stories where the human and dog actors tell the story with their own language. We don’t need to be told the dog is sad when his owner drives away – we can see that… the dogs are very good actors. But, no, the movie shoves cutesy Josh Gadd’s voice into the movie. Sometimes – occasionally – he’ll say something poignant but mainly he’s just there to over-explain things and crack bad jokes.
Otherwise, yeah, it’s a movie that tells decent to good human stories linked together by the dog. The human stories aren’t terrible and the whole movie is just kind of fine. I wasn’t in love with it, I felt it was manipulative in the way you’d expect, but it was a decent watch. And if you aren’t a cold-hearted bastard like me, you might just cry a box of Kleenex for each dead dog (since, yeah, that was pretty moving).
Score: 78