Strays
UNIVERSAL*This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes.
Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the movie being covered here wouldn’t exist.*
This review will be extremely short, because there isn’t anything of interest to be said about Josh Greenbaum’s latest film, Strays. How can someone go from one of the smartest, most surprising and off-kilter comedies made in the 21st century with Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar to…this…is astounding. In isolation, the movie could’ve worked: it flips the family-friendly trope of talking dog movies to its head and fully commits to its hard-R premise of foul-mouthed dogs doing the most unabashedly crude things imaginable. Of course, once it would go past the penis, peepee and poo jokes, it could’ve worked.
Unfortunately, the movie never goes past those 10 minutes of audience members going “Haha, look, they’re making the dog say Penis! LOL!” because the entire film rests around the premise of the film’s main dog, Reggie (Will Ferrell), to travel to his “owner’s” (Will Forte) home and bite his dick off. Haha. Very funny.
He’s joined by a group of stray dogs: Bug (Jamie Foxx), Maggie (Isla Fisher) and Hunter (Randall Park), going from one ridiculous situation to the next: they pee on each other, poo on humans, bite their former owner’s penis, it’s all there. But here’s the biggest cardinal sin the film commits: it’s not funny. None of it is. No, scratch that. The only funny moment in this film happens when Josh Gad cameos as a “Narrator Dog,” reprising his role from A Dog’s Purpose and A Dog’s Journey. And, hey, Dennis Quaid, who starred in both films, also appears. The meta-references on both films work, but it never goes deep into blending raunchy comedy with family-friendly tropes, which is what it should’ve done in the first place.
Instead, audiences are instead treated to one gross-out scene after the next, with almost no interruption and sense of comedic timing. Anyone can debate on the artistic value of the Jackass films, but this group of amateur stuntmen understood comedic timing and pushed the boundaries of physical, gross-out humor to the extremes. No one could not laugh at seeing PK Subban hit Ehren McGhehey in the balls to test if a cup would hold in Jackass Forever. The scene was hilarious, because it consistently built its tension up from Francis Ngannou, to the Hockey stunt, and then the pogo stick. The first iteration is mildly funny, until it becomes completely uncontrollable the moment the pogo stick hits Ehren’s nuts. Everyone in the audience felt it.
Strays has no sense of comedic timing, nor does it understand the art of crafting a physical comedy based on nothing but peepee poopoo jokes. It’s fine to have the dogs say “penis” for five seconds, but when the jig wears itself thin amazingly quickly, “what else ya got?”
Well, screenwriter Dan Perrault doesn’t have much: he fills the film with so much gross-out humor that he puts himself in the corner as soon as he attempts to back out to infuse some form of humanity within the four dogs. The second half of the film is more “heartfelt” than the first, which is a nonstop barrage of pee and poop jokes (because that’s all dogs do apparently, in the mind of Perrault and Greenbaum), but it’s not enough to save the film from being anything else than a profoundly irritating attempt at subverting family-friendly storytelling. Not even the voice cast fully commits to its premise: Ferrell is usually excellent, even in lousy movies like Holmes & Watson and Daddy’s Home 2. He always brings his A-game and is one of the last comics who can make a whole room laugh through his yell (please see the “Bad Cop Bad Cop” scene in Adam McKay’s The Other Guys for reference).
However, he sounds completely bored voicing what basically amounts to be the dog version of Buddy the Elf. He’s so clueless that his owner doesn’t love him that he deludes himself in thinking he’s his best friend, until he gets to learn exactly what kind of person his “owner” really is. Foxx is also deeply unfunny, which is unfortunate because he usually has great comedic timing. All Greenbaum and Perrault make him do here is blurt out the F-bomb at every possible second, instead of giving him a semi-character arc? It’s one thing to be raunchy, but the film consistently forgets to have heart and invest the audience in the story through its characters. Not even Fisher and Park can do anything remotely interesting with their respective supporting turns, even if Fisher goes out of the film unscathed.
Park, on the other hand, should keep this film out of his resume, especially as he is the center stage of its most embarrassing scene. A five-year-old who just discovered the word “penis” will likely think it’s the film’s morceau de bravoure, as Hunter attempts to retrieve a key with his (extremely large) penis. The CHILDREN in the screening’s audience (yes, children, even if the film is rated R) were howling like they saw Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield show up in Spider-Man: No Way Home for the first time. Good for them, but they’ll probably rewatch it in fifteen years from now thinking they had terrible taste. It’s the nature of things, of course.
Maybe this critic is a bitter, sad, old man. Turning 25 is certainly a challenge, but this critic also thought the stupidest comedy of the decade so far, Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar, is one of the funniest films ever made. Because of this, Strays should’ve been another home run from Josh Greenbaum. Instead, it’s one the most embarrassing things a Hollywood studio released in this decade and will stand the test of time as one of the worst comedies ever made. Woof.