dir. Brian Robbins
The premise of this reboot movie, The Shaggy Dog, sounds completely insane. Because it is. Tim Allen plays a man who is bitten by a sacred immortal dog. This means he is now able to transform into a dog, although only sometimes, and it’s never quite clear what exactly provokes the transformation. Nevertheless, he must use his power to reveal the evil workings of a sinister laboratory which is conducting bizarre experiments on mutant animals, run by a far-too-committed Robert Downey Jr. All of this is far beyond the realms of sanity, but what’s really frustrating about The Shaggy Dog is that despite all this, it really is the same boring story yet again. Allen’s character is a workaholic dad, who must use all these zany shenanigans to reset his priorities and remember the importance of family. It’s the same movie which has been made a thousand times already, just with the added aspect of creepy CGI to make the mutant animals the stuff of absolute nightmares. The plot is barely coherent, but except for Downey Jr, it doesn’t seem like anyone really cares anyway. It has to be assumed the original instalments of the Shaggy Dog franchise are better than this, because it’s hard to imagine how they could be any worse.
BMDb 