PUPS ALONE (2021)

I know this sounds like a sassy pun, but I swear it isn’t intended as one: I will try my best not to be catty about PUPS ALONE just for the sake of being bitchy. There are some…not hard to identify problems with this movie, but there are actually some highlights that deserve recognition. Plus, in case this needs to be said, it’s a miracle any film gets made. Coordinating schedules and funds, locations and equipment, multiple visions that have to coalesce into something. Add in multiple locations, varying levels of stars, and trained animals?

Director Alex Merkin (yep) has created something more than I ever have or ever will. Nothing this nerd says in this post can take that away. Hopefully it’s understood that there is a baseline of respect and appreciation for the project along with fairness of calling out those surprising moments that show genuine promise.

Now that we’ve established the point from which I’m approaching PUPS ALONE…this film is a goddamn disaster.

Is it as abominable as A TALKING CAT!?!, the other movie with Eric Roberts and featuring animal narration? No. No it is not. Consider that the floor when it comes to talking animal films that feature Eric Roberts. The nadir possible is that David Decoteau cinematic experience that is 40% establishing shots (of totally different geographic locations), botched audio, legitimately insulting F/X, and a script that can be best be described as “special”.

PUPS ALONE is leaps and bounds beyond A TALKING CAT!?! and its adventures of Fluffy. So that’s something! And the star power consists of more than semi-retired child star, a woman who torpedoed her career with a venture into porn, and a terrific actor who sounds like he literally phoned in his performance…possibly on the floor of a hotel bathroom after a delicious Vicodin milkshake (allegedly).

The story is pretty straightforward and what you expect from the title: A group of dogs must defend a house from thieves during Christmastime. Is that a good idea for a movie? No. But is it the worst idea for a movie? Also no. Add into it that most of the dogs are impressively trained and pull off some nice moves. Most of the time animal actors have like three sets of moves that are done over and over again.

It’s a very unique feeling to feel secondhand embarrassment for an animal. Not “oh that poor dog” but “I bet everyone treated this pup really well and it thought it did a great job. Poor bastard.” You definitely feel that way when watching PUPS ALONE but it’s mitigated by “that’s a neat trick” every so often.

Another bit about the canine thespians, and for you artists out there about to embark on your own four-legged friend film take note: they spend too much time panting.

Can that be helped? Presumably by giving them plenty of water and not running them ragged. Overall, that’s just how animals. That’s fine. Or if they are doing all their impressive stunt work, certainly they’ve earned it.

But PUPS ALONE has scenes where they are meant to be having “conversations” with each other (using pooch telepathy) and the fact they are panting (HARD) the entire time is just a weird combination of sight and sound.

Speaking of sound…guys, I don’t know. I just…guys, I don’t know. We all love Danny Trejo, right? He seems like a genuinely nice person who has had a tough life but turned it around to help people and turn in strong performances in some very impressive work. PUPS ALONE saddles him with the character of a Vinny P., the cantankerous bully bulldog that runs the neighborhood and insists everyone call him “The Dogfather”. Okay, combining an Italian mafioso stock character with the voice most associated with Mexican gangster figures is a choice.

Meanwhile there’s Malcolm McDowell as a scrappy terrier with an Oliver Twist street urchin accent who is brought in because he’s the only dog to ever defy “The Dogfather”…but he doesn’t really do anything to the Dogfather. The fact that all of the voice recording took, at best, an entire afternoon for a probably not bad paycheck helps this to make sense. PUPS ALONE is from Paramount and Saban (yeah, the Buffy and Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers company), so they have money. And to be fair, for the most part, no one is phoning it in. That doesn’t mean those present are doing a good job, just that they seem like they’re trying despite all indications in the script and on screen that should dissuade them from doing so. But then…there’s what scientists call the “Rob Schneider Lingering Illusion”. Wherein the “actor” and “comedian” isn’t actually in a film that much, but leaves behind such a stink that it seems he’s practically in every scene.

Schneider is back to dipping into his Latin background so his accent isn’t technically racist (unlike 50 FIRST DATES or I NOW PRONOUNCE YOU CHUCK & LARRY). He plays an over excited, sycophantic chihuahua, but it is almost exactly the same schtick as the Taco Bell dog from the ‘90s and ‘00s. It’s a new low for the star of ¡Rob!, which is saying a lot.

Trejo and McDowell find ways to maintain their charms even with awful dialogue filtered through the panting faces of dogs staring just beyond the camera into the middle distance. Schneider cribs from a fast food mascot to deliver a terrible mix of Speedy Gonzales and the Frito Bandito hopped up on goofballs.

He frantically spews lines at the audience like an assault of atrocious accents. Many perish underneath such battery…and they are the lucky ones. Again, he’s not actually in the movie that much but dear lord does a little Schneider go a long way.

Last of the canine crew are the “leads” (pun not intended for our UK friends), Charlie and Gidget voiced by Jerry O’Connell and Jennifer Love Hewitt, respectively. It’s bizarre because both actors have turned in fine comedic performances, even in fluffier fare, but there’s just nothing going on here.

They are perfectly fine milquetoast romantic lead rovers, but they don’t sound like themselves and there’s no sort of vocal inflection to make their characters anything more than sub-par Wishbones.

Remember HEARTBREAKERS? Not a great movie, but Hewitt does great work with her voice to help create her scheming character’s coquettish personas.

Here it’s not devoid of emotion, it’s just devoid of any real personality. To be fair, the target audience isn’t a depressed 39-year-old fan of the French Extreme horror films and South Korean morality thrillers; will younger audiences and those suffering traumatic head injuries really pick apart the performances in PUPS ALONE? No. But Trejo and McDowell show they aren’t phoning it in, and some of the humans are trying their best too!

To back up just a little, while the film is sold on the HOMEWARD BOUND ALONE mash-up (eh), the film is fairly split with the human story. In an UP-like animated prologue in which Charlie is adopted by the family, the mom suddenly gets sick and dies, leaving behind her husband, Robert (Tyler Hollinger), and daughter, Jenna (Isadora Swann). Robert gets so sucked into his work as an inventor that he neglects his daughter and then they suddenly have to move so Robert can work for Pet Tech, a company never mentioned until they arrive at the neighborhood that Pet Tech apparently owns and populates with its employees.

A word about the occasional animated (computer renderings of drawings on paper that pop up like the Game Of Thrones opening credits) interludes before moving on: I laughed a couple of times at them. Like genuine laughs. Not guffaws! Not belly busters. But Marlon Young’s narration is very smooth and pleasant, and the jokes about the camera not following where he’s directing them or simply giving up on how stupid the characters are is nice bit of audience representation. The animation itself resembles Brad Bird’s post-Family Dog/pre-IRON GIANT days with a dollop of Don Bluth thrown in for good measure. There’s not many of these brief moments, but they are good vehicles for exposition delivery and made me (awkwardly) chuckle a couple of times. I’m not proud of it, but there we are.

There’s that odd thing in family films where it’s not from a child’s perspective, but it uses child logic. Like “yeah, obviously these wacky inventors for the leading pet technology firm will all have to live together in a basic suburban development; that’s how adults do!” Soon Robert meets Holly (Sara Lindsey), the obvious love interest and owner of Ginger, but he’s too busy being a big ole klutz and absent-minded inventor to act like a person. It’s odd how the film is legitimately all sorts of wackadoo shenanigans for the human story right up until a very specific scene where a lesson is delivered by an incredible actor delivering the best performance of the film. We’ll get there.

Then everything kind of mellows out and the same quality of jokes persist, but without the same level of flopsweat in trying to sell everything as so goddamn kooky and cutesy. Well, not everything mellows out. The thieves (Nicholas Turturro and Stelio Savante) remain manic morons whose buffoonery is so over the top that it’s competing for a truck in Vegas. (Thank you, tip your waiter.)

The duo are more comparable to the bumbling underlings in 3 NINJAS than the borderline sociopaths of Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern in HOME ALONE. There’s cartoon sound effects when they fall or they don’t understand words and…it’s like if “Yakkety Sax” was made into the form of two dim-witted overactors. It’s grating and I’d like to think they deserve better.

But if you want to know who keeps this malformed bird afloat upon his mighty Scandinavian shoulders, it’s Dolph Lundgren. He eats so much of the scenery that he probably crapped out a Christmas tree or two, but it’s the right level of over-the-top.

To PUPS ALONE credit, they manage to combine a bunch of traits of family film villains into one character, and it actually makes sense and—brace yourselves—he’s actually a fairly sympathetic character (except when he awkwardly hugs women too aggressively and the other characters rightfully call him a creep).

But he’s the sycophantic entitled corporate ladder climber, combined with the jealous overlooked has-been, and the scheming criminal mastermind with his goons, while constantly needing to be the alpha dog in every situation. (That time the pun was intended). There’s a lot going on with his character and most of it is so broad it’s basically a Diego Rivera mural, but he still has more charm in his latter day performances than he was ever allowed to in the ‘80s and ‘90s.

It’s also funny because, while everyone else is spewing technobabble that doesn’t make sense, I couldn’t stop thinking about how this world champion martial artist and Olympic athlete and action star also has his Masters in chemical engineering and was awarded a Fullbright scholarship to M.I.T. before leaving to go bang Grace Jones in New York for a while. Yeah, all of that is true. I would strongly encourage someone to start making a documentary about this man with many hours of interviews because from nerd to karate master to bouncer at Limelight to bodyguard to B-list actor to beloved action star to activist fighting sex trafficking…that’s a lot of life he’s lived already.

All this also means that, out of everyone involved in PUPS ALONE, it’s plausible that Lundgren was the scientific consultant to give the writers and cast terms to use to make the lines seem slightly more official and a bit less like they belong in a HOME ALONE ripoff starring talented but disinterested dogs.

Lundgren’s Victor constantly shows off his many awards—including a boxing trophy (as seen in the still to the left) in case you forgot HE’S DRAGO, THE GREATEST FAILURE IN SOVIET HISTORY, IN THAT OTHER CHRISTMAS MOVIE!

Still, the dude is fun and seems to be having fun hamming it up and being a pretty good kids’ movie antagonist. It’s kind of surprising that more of the ‘80s action heroes didn’t turn to villainous roles in family films (except Stallone in that SPY KIDS entry); they don’t need to be great thespians and must be physically imposing while delivering overly ominous dialogue or ridiculous lines. I’m guessing none of them want to be seen as a fool.

Well, Lundgren chucks his ego away like it was a Fullbright scholarship to M.I.T. and does legitimately fun work in PUPS ALONE. Please note: this is not reason enough to watch PUPS ALONE, but the actor should be commended for delivering something of value amidst…everything else happening on screen.

Speaking of lack of pride, Eric Roberts. That’s an unfair joke mostly based on the cinematic horrorshow that is A TALKING CAT!?!. The dude is actually a solid actor, but it’s not hard to guess what has set him back at various points in his career. He is slumming it in PUPS ALONE (again, and I literally cannot state this enough, not as bad as A TALKING CAT!?!), but he is given the most adult role with maybe the best bit is where he clearly loathes the tomfoolery happening around him.

Another quick note: the names of the policemen that show up to deal with criminals eventually? Office Duewrong and Detective Tom Foolery. Next stop—Oscars!

But I will close this too long look at the buffet of second-hand embarrassment that is PUPS ALONE by highlighting the best performance of the entire film. Nay, the best part of the entire film. It’s less than five minutes of screen time. And it’s just one person. Generous reading public…you know him, you love him…yep, you guessed it:

It’s Keith Muthafuckin’ David.

Drink him in, folks; he always goes down smooth. This is someone with multiple outstanding performances in every genre of film from every decade since he started appearing in films in the ‘80s. Yep, his first for-real character with a name credited acting role in a movie was Childs in John Carpenter’s THE THING. His FIRST. I’ll admit, I’m beyond partial to this man. If he marched to the gates of hell I would keep stride with him. Probably pepper him with weird questions about MEN AT WORK, REQUIEM FOR A DREAM, and Gargoyles, but still—he is a national treasure and anyone that ever has anything negative to say about Keith David better prepare for a tornado of fat nerd aggression coming their way because I won’t stand for it.

Well he shows up in PUPS ALONE to show everyone how it’s done, and is rewarded by being credited as “The Wise Bartender”. He’s…I mean…remember Bagger Vance?…that is to say…okay…The dude is kind of an off-duty magical Negro trope.

Not great.

But rather than devolve into Stepin Fetchit and deflecting to the white nerdy patriarch, “Wise Bartender” commands the screen. For four minutes and about 47 seconds, PUPS ALONE is a real movie. “Wise Bartender” is funny, offers actual emotional insight like humans have; he’s a breath of fresh air that combines David’s lovable but gruff Community work with his lovable but gruff doting father figure in THERE’S SOMETHING ABOUT MARY.

Plus, I dunno, the tranquil wisdom of Goliath from Gargoyles. Look, guys: I love Gargoyles and I love Keith David.

Him popping up in this hate crime against cinema was a Festivus fucking miracle and it also legitimately marks a change in tone and energy in the film that makes the rest more palatable. Or maybe that was me enjoying the afterglow of seeing Keith David. We live again; we live again…indeed.

So that’s PUPS ALONE. Any plot point I didn’t cover, you probably guessed already. Again, it is not easy to create, make, and distribute a movie. There are a million hurdles a million times over from the first line of the script to the last second of the end credits. No matter how easy it is to throw rocks at these works (and, hahaha, they don’t make it hard), they exist. Merkin and company made a film. Parents are proud, siblings are jealous, tax incentives were utilized to help next year’s fiscal budget.

And there are good moments. Some decent jokes in the narration and from Dolph Lundgren. Some impressively trained dogs with voice actors that aren’t lying on the floor in a pool of their own misery while recording their lines (sorry, Eric Roberts). And Keith David. So, is it worth checking out? With all of the fighting betwixt man and beast, the pratfalls and home security shenanigans, is there enough heart, hard hitting action, and holiday hilarity for you and your family to fire up PUPS ALONE tonight?

\

…no. Obviously not.

No.