Review: OLD DOGS

A turkey.  Over stuffed.  More sour than cranberry sauce.  As flat as a thin layer of mashed potatoes.  More painful than the post-turkey dinner walk to the couch.  Take your pick of these Thanksgiving euphemisms that, each one of them, describes the new comedy OLD DOGS, a film so void of successful humor, it could be eligible for Best Drama at next year’s Golden Globe awards if it were any good.  It’s not.  In fact, it’s downright  infuriating  to watch so much effort put into something so delusional of itself.

You can thank director Walt Becker, who didn’t do enough damage to John Travolta’s career when he put him in a biker gang with Tim Allen, William H. Macy, and Martin Lawrence, for much of OLD DOGS’ failures.  Becker’s come a ways since his days of dishing out R-rated fare like VAN WILDER and the straight-to-video BUYING THE COW.  Though his taste levels have gone the way of Disney, his talent as a director seems to be plummeting down a long cliff.  With OLD DOGS, he hits rock bottom, taking the script that wasn’t any good to begin with by THE FAMILY MAN scribes David Diamond and David Weissman and attempting to breath some kind of life into it.

The  aforementioned  Travolta plays Charlie and Robin Williams plays Dan, two bachelors who are trying to get their sports marketing company its biggest deal yet.  As with any, good, flavorless, family comedy, kids come in and muck up the whole works, as Dan realizes a short fling he had seven years before resulted in twins.  Now, with the mother facing a short stint behind bars (don’t even worry about an explanation there) and the only, other option to watch the kids in the hospital with a neck brace (again, don’t ask for an explanation), Dan volunteers his time and efforts to watching them.  Hilarity should ensue, but, sadly, it never seems to.

There are moments in OLD DOGS, very noticeable moments, where certain characters are appearing to crack a joke, make a funny, whatever most comedies of this nature try to do.  The other actors in the scene walk all over the line or interrupt the first person.  It’s strange.  It’s distracting.  It does everything to its audience this type of film shouldn’t do.  Whole segments of film seem to be moving the narrative towards some sort of heart.  At one point, Dan, fed up with the way the kids are fouling up his adult-time at every turn, goes off to Charlie about how he never wanted to be a father.  He turns to see the face of a seven-year-old boy hurt by his father’s words.  It is such a painfully obvious scene that Becker and crew do with it the only thing they know to.  They completely drop it in favor of one more sight gag or act of futile physical comedy.

What we are left with, then, is a film full of stutter steps, but, unfortunately, one that believes itself to be a long jumper.  It moves from one scene to another putting the adults in obvious peril while the kids sit in the background either watching on blankly or causing the next kind of havoc.  Seriously, I cannot tell whether the kids in these roles, Conner Rayburn and Ella Bleu Travolta, are any good or not.  The fact that there are children in this film is a moot point entirely, a MacGuffin whose only purpose is to move the film towards its next whirlwind of humorless chest-beating.

Travolta and Williams seem to love beating their chest, as well.  They act as if louder and more erratic equals funny never mind what’s going on with their characters.  You would never guess watching them throw themselves about or hide behind strange, makeup enhancing face twitches that these were once credible actors, one of whom one an Academy Award a little over a decade ago.

Seth Green seems to be completely lost.  You can almost see the gears churning in his head about the next ROBOT CHICKEN episode while he’s trying not to look bored with getting hit below the belt or tossed around a gorilla cage.  Let’s just forget Bernie Mac even appears here and say his last film was SOUL MEN.  Can that level of revisionist history occur, please?  Matt Dillon and Justin Long appear to be the only ones in the film who seem to know what they are doing.  Long actually elicits more than the mildest of chuckles in his five minutes of screen time.  Maybe that was just a good couple of days of shooting.  Their scenes are, in fact, together.

There just doesn’t seem to be any place for a film like OLD DOGS, a movie that brings neither humor nor heart to an already stale premise.  Honestly, a bad movie is one thing, but what is found here is something else entirely.  I rarely allow myself to hate a film.  There are certainly films I do not like, but hate is such a strong emotion to have for a motion picture that its usage is reserved only now and again for films that, I feel, do more harm than good.  A film like OLD DOGS will have its backers.  No film is ever either lauded or admonished completely.  To those that would laud a film like OLD DOGS, I can only say, “I don’t understand you, nor do I have any desire to do so.”  To those who would rebuke a film this blank, this lame, and this unabashedly useless, I can only say, “Yeah.  That’s pretty obvious.  Now let’s have some turkey.”