A Dog's Journey (2019) - Movie Review

Fiction is manipulative by design. It’s a story featuring events and people that, for the most part, don’t exist and yet, in spite of that, it’s meant to make you care about what is happening and who it is happening to. It doesn’t always work out that way, but that’s the general idea: Manipulate a given audience to buy into something that didn’t happen. But even with that in mind, few things in recent memory have strained that necessary evil as much as A Dog’s Purpose, a film that still gets on my nerves a good four years after watching it for just how shameless it was. You can imagine that I wasn’t exactly looking forward to its sequel, even with the kinda-sorta pre-show we got earlier in the year with A Dog’s Way Home, but surprisingly, this film was a lot better than I was expecting.

For one, that icky feeling that we’re watching animals die just for the audience to get weepy? That’s thankfully toned down severely here. The main plot gimmick of the dog who keeps reincarnating as other dogs is still in place, but with the focus being put squarely on his connection to a single owner, it puts the emotional emphasis where it needs to be for this to work. Josh Gad’s voice-over work still works as a look into the mind of a dog, managing to get quite a few grins out of me, and when put next to Abby Ryder Fortson and Kathryn Prescott as CJ, it can get quite adorable.

Of course, that’s not to say that this film has completely foregone its strong-arming to get the audience to feel something; it’s just focused on the humans rather than the animals this time around. From CJ’s impossibly selfish bitch of a mother in Beth Gilpin’s Gloria, to her abusive lout of a ‘boyfriend’ as played by Jake Manley (insert your own joke about Manley behaviour here), there’s some definite hate-watch fuel here. The writing as a whole, which has 4 of the 5 writers from Purpose returning, is quite thin and lacking in anything like nuance, but it’s with the characters the audience is supposed to get angry at that it becomes the most malnourished.

The self-aware bitterness and the overwhelming sweetness do end up balancing themselves out, especially when put in context to the film’s overall take on humanity through the eyes of a canine. Basically, it boils down to the act of having a pet as showing a willingness to care about something that isn’t themselves, a trait that the hateable characters blatantly lack (as in it’s literally spelled out in the dialogue that they lack empathy). And with the film delving into canine cancer detection to strengthen the importance of man/man’s-best-friend relations, it shows there’s at least some method to the manipulation with this one.

So, yeah, this was enjoyable. It may not fix all of the issues I took with its predecessor, and it is still very lightweight and disposable (its treatment of cancer only just misses Miss You Already territory), but for an over-100-minute sit, I feel like I got my money’s worth in cute antics. Only recommended to those with a strong stomach for the sentimental, but as far as dog drama at the multiplex, it’s the best example I’ve seen in a very long time.