Directed By Walt Becker

Starring – Darby Camp, Jack Whitehall, Izaac Wang

The Plot – As middle schooler Emily (Camp) struggles to fit in at home and at school, she discovers a small red puppy who is destined to become her best friend from a magical animal rescuer. When Clifford becomes a gigantic red dog in her New York City apartment and attracts the attention of a genetics company who wish to supersize animals, Emily and her clueless Uncle Casey (Whitehall) have to fight the forces of greed as they go on the run across New York City and take a bite out of the Big Apple. Along the way, Clifford affects the lives of everyone around him and teaches Emily and her uncle the true meaning of acceptance and unconditional love. Based on the beloved Scholastic character, Clifford will teach the world how to love big.

Rated PG for impolite humor, thematic elements and mild action

clifford the big red dog trailer – YouTube

POSITIVES

– Heartfelt appeal. Perhaps it’s the growing softie that I’m shamefully becoming, or the divisiveness of the contemporary world we currently live in, but I found Clifford’s arrival to be endearingly appropriate, especially with the benefit of a cultural message that it competently and continuously unloads throughout. For a kids movie, the ideals of diverse people bringing big results is certainly nothing new or original in concept, but the execution is charming in its rich sense of community, which supplants a benefit of togetherness that makes anything and everything feel possible, and the corresponding tonal enveloping, while initially silly throughout the hijinks of the first act, does mature with an air of sentimentality that doesn’t feel melodramatic or sappy for all of the wrong reasons. Instead of being another slapstick drone of mindless appeal for kids, it unloads a hefty tenderness that pays homage to the 2000’s original animated series, and proves that its heart is always in the right place, despite its occasional hiccups.

– Enthusiastic direction. Becker has had a filmography as abstract and spontaneous as anyone going today, but his return to live action kids movies brings with it an alluring presence behind the presentation that keeps audiences hooked in the sense of its constant kinetic energy. Certainly the benefit of swift pacing pays off tremendously for this initiative, keeping the film constantly going throughout 87 urgent minutes that continuously pushes the pace of the storytelling towards its inevitable conflict, but the photography from Becker certainly shouldn’t be understated. Blessed with appropriate proximity and movement cues that help to outline Clifford’s movements long before his computer-generated property is introduced into the integrity of the sequence, the compositions yearn for the adventure that they captivate in every eager intention, giving us the professionalism of an experienced director, with the imagination of a child to the benefit of the experience.

– Meaningful animation. While there are certainly problems with the complete outline of Clifford’s artificial materializing, which I will get to later, the animated encompassing of the dog’s facial registries help to unlock internal resonation over the hypnosis of its audience, while playing into an aspect of animated production that sadly often gets overlooked. Whether in the bold depths of watery eyes, or the personality deposited to various facial reactions, there’s a clear sense of connection that the audience can easily interpret with Clifford himself, which in turn fleshes out the scenes of tonal evolution all the more effectively because we’re able to define and distinguish how the victim is feeling at any given time. There’s little realistic about their designs, but authenticity is secondary for brilliantly channeled empathy, to which Clifford is not at all devoid from.

NEGATIVES

– Flat story. For a film pertaining to an extraordinary dog who is deemed different in every single way, the script to the film is one lacking similar motivations, making this feel like a horde of other similarly constructed kids movies that were done first and better than this. Familiarity is certainly one problem here, but predictability is the primary antagonist to the movie’s creativity, outlining a safe, tension-less shell of a film that can easily be sniffed out from an overtly revealing trailer, and from the word go, when our protagonist is revealed to have no friends because she’s deemed different from everyone she shares a school with. See the problem here? The obviousness of the movie’s resolution is revealed within the opening five minutes of the movie, making this feel like a continuous chore, where the movie is constantly catching up to our preconceived knowledge of the inevitable, stitching together every cliche with it along the way that feel like a greatest hits for outdated kids movies that I thought were a thing of the past.

– Bland performances. To be fair, Camp’s Emily isn’t that bad, she’s just smothered in conventional story beats and one-dimensional characterization that would make it impossible to break free from. As for everyone else, there isn’t a single endearing performance between a stacked ensemble of comedic veterans that include David Alan Grier, Rosie Perez, Kenan Thompson, and Tony Hale, to name a few. The worst is certainly Whitehall, who even in a film with as much exaggerated emphasis in the tonal qualities, still feels overtly out of place in this film. Not only does every line of dialogue for his character become a punchline that builds towards the character overstaying his welcome in his first ten minutes on-screen, but he’s void of the same charisma like Ryan Reynolds or Kumail Nanjiani, who would bring this character to life seamlessly. He’s easily my least favorite performance of the entire year, and if “Playing With Fire” made a sequel that was inspired to give me more nightmares, he would be the primary candidate for an additional role, if even just for the painful deliveries that stem from this obnoxious man-child who feels inappropriate for every scene he accommodates.

– Meandering music. Even an hour after seeing this film, I’m still debating which was worse; the wet-blanketed emphasis of the musical score by John Debny, or the top 40 pop favorites whose only intention were to sell downloads. Part of me leans towards the former, especially considering Debny assembles various tones for situations and characters whenever they invade the screen. For instance, the ominously gloomy resonance of horns move into frame whenever dog catchers or various antagonists weave into focus, only to be quickly dispersed by the fluffiness and warm feeling of the piano whenever Clifford or Emily takes ahold of the story. The problem is that the tones themselves are so on-the-nose and void of anything evolving in their fifteen second sampling, feeling like Hallmark music that plays and repeats whenever you open one of their gold-label cards. As for the soundtrack, Kesha’s “Boogie Feet” is a fun electro-rock fire-starter that sets the pace for an action sequence, but beyond that nothing feels even momentarily appropriate in complimentary fashion, in either lyrical or musical influence.

– Dreadful humor. One laugh. That’s all that effectively registered with me throughout the entirety of this film. I could easily blame it on the one-sided nature of the material, which lacks the kind of dark underlining of “Dora the Explorer”, or even the psychological commentary of Pixar features, but I feel like the bigger problem is that the material itself often includes exaggerated emphasis in the deliveries of its punchlines, making this feel like the kid on the playground who has the various zingers that only he himself finds hilarious. In addition to the material itself not being effective, there’s a surprising insensitivity with the film’s cultural depictions, which begin with two Puerto Rican characters jaw-jabbing in a family owned bodega, and end with an Asian boy yelling “GODZILLA DOG” when he spots Clifford for the first time. It’s the lowest common denominator of hanging fruit that this movie continuously reaches for, proving how little its material has to distract the audience when Clifford is either not on-screen, or when the five screenwriters run out of big dog in a small apartment jokes.

– Inconsistent C.G. To be fair, there are times when Clifford is small, where the the special effects do maintain scenes where the dog immerses himself seamlessly in the live action layers surrounding him. However, this momentary pleasantry is put to bed when the dog evolves overnight into the titanic force he’s advertised as, bringing with it a lifeless layering and dramatically diverse frame rate from the corresponding film, which make his movements unnatural in both a gravitational and conceptual truth. The heft is certainly there from the complimentary direction from Becker at the forefront of the sequences, but when the dog is in motion conveys a bigger obviousness in compromising fluidity that sticks out like a turd on a mattress, and makes so much of the consistency of images from the film’s spectacle gimmick feel unnatural in their disjointed essence.

– Product placement. It’s been a while since my favorite cinematic trope of disingenuous intention made its presence felt in a mainstream film, but of course it had to be a pandering kids film that is quite literally tugging at the strings of their underlining nostalgia. Why it’s so bad here is not only the obviousness of its intention, with a Honey Comb cereal box being front and center in both the framing of the shot, and also in the center of the dinner table, but also how the editing enhances its appearance with each passing cut. Because of such, it gave me something entirely new than I’ve ever experienced, in that with each different angle from character perception, the box moves to re-establish concentration in its appearance. A big red dog is impressive enough, but a phantom cereal box fighting its characters for screen domination is something truly special, demeaning itself on a new low for soulless advertising too hilarious not to be seen.

My Grade: 4/10 or D-