A Dog's Way Home

photo courtesy of newsday.com

SPOILER-FREE REVIEW

     In A Dog’s Way Home, a friendly dog named Bella (voiced by Bryce Dallas Howard) gets separated from her owner Lucas (Jonah Hauer-King). To travel the hundreds of miles back home, Bella will have to learn new tricks, make new friends, and even outsmart a pack of wolves. But even if she makes it back to Denver, she’ll have to survive one last obstacle: a mean old policeman. A Dog’s Way Home also stars Ashley Judd, Edward James Olmos, and Alexandra Shipp.

     Full disclosure, this kind of movie isn’t really up my alley, and I expect I’m not alone. But if you do happen to find yourself in the target demographic (kids and/or dog-lovers), here’s the headline: A Dog’s Way Home fulfills its basic promise, which is to provide a heartwarming story about adorable animals that’ll give you goosebumps/tears at the end. The dog is cute, the people are cute, the story is (mostly) cute, the soundtrack stops just short of Sarah McLachlan, and that’s probably all you need to know.

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     Beyond that, A Dog’s Way Home doesn’t have much going for it. Some of the flaws are fairly typical; you anticipate bad acting and cheesy scenes in this type of movie. It’s part of the experience. Other things, however, go beyond what you might expect. I’ve detailed a few in the paragraphs that follow:

     1) The script is poorly structured, which means that events don’t really escalate in any meaningful way until the very end—they’re just presented in order, without much connection between the episodes. It’s not dissimilar from the way Steven Spielberg tells the story in War Horse, but there the episodic fragments have a stronger link to the final result, so most of it still feels important.

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     2) The writers don’t give Bella any friends who can talk. As far as we can tell, she’s the only animal who can speak *our* language, so most of the movie consists of Bella interpreting things to the audience via constant narration. It’s more montage than scene, per se.

     And 3), A Dog’s Way Home has a hard time balancing its light tone with the darker elements that appear from time to time. There’s nothing too dark (it’s PG, after all), but Bella does encounter a few rather ominous obstacles that seem out of place. Each time, the movie just skirts around the issue awkwardly, leaving the audience to wonder why the filmmakers brought it up at all.

photo courtesy of usatoday.com

     These may seem nitpicky, sure, but plenty of movies in the genre do it better. The perennial classic Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey, which has a nearly identical plot, is one film that neatly avoids each of these pitfalls. So while A Dog’s Way Home will ultimately check the right boxes for its target audience, it won’t do much else.

A Dog’s Way Home is rated PG for thematic elements, some peril, and language.

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