Because there are only so many spaces for me to watch movies in December, I’ve tried to be careful with the ones I pick for review. This year has involved less of me actively seeking bad movies to watch; not saying I haven’t gone after them on purpose at all in 2022, just that I’ve done less of it. This will be an exception, though, as this is primarily the result of morbid curiosity on my part as to how this could be the third-lowest rated film of 2022 on Letterboxd (beneath the 365 Days sequels), as well as meeting my ‘bitching about talking animal movies’ quota for the year. From the director of the film version of Spawn… seriously… here's Marmaduke.
Y’know, the animation almost fooled me at first. When it opened on a wide shot of Marmaduke’s neighbourhood, the background work looked alright; not amazing, but serviceable. But then it zoomed into Marmaduke’s face, and I felt like I had time-travelled back to the early 2000s. Beyond the fact that the character designs here have gone so far into stylisation that everyone from the humans to the animals look deformed, like tumorous growths with pipe cleaners attached to them, the texture quality is just straight garbage. Skin looks like plastic, water looks like jelly, and giant green fart clouds… okay, they look like they should, even though they probably shouldn’t be here in the first place. The 2011 film starring Owen Wilson was a live-action eyesore with effects work that were outdated even for the time, and even that looks better than this monstrosity.
It doesn’t help that the humour is about as far behind the times as well. The dramatic record scratch, a mocked-up Star Wars text crawl (that’s just the same few things repeated, because attention to detail is for nurdz!), “I can’t believe I ate the whole thing”?! I get that everything is available for Googling nowadays, but that doesn’t excuse the thick and acrid layers of dust coating these gags. And indeed “gag” was my main reaction to a lot of this, as hearing Pete Davidson and J.K. Simmons try and make this dialogue work was stomach-churning.
With everything else that fails about this, pointing anything to do with the plot seems besides the point, but rest assured, it sucks too. It’s a generic sports movie narrative with Marmaduke being trained by Guy Hilton (Brian Hull, making me take back any reservations about his take on Sandler’s Dracula) to compete in a dog show against Simmons’ Zeus. Not only is this incredibly dull as it is, I’m fairly certain I’ve already seen these exact same plot points in other talking-animal films before (Pup Star, maybe? I dunno).
In terms of animation, voice acting, humour, and just general aesthetics, this feels like a bound and a leap backwards from the standard for modern family-friendly animation. Everything from its deceptively average opening to Marmaduke rapping over the end credits (please don’t make me have to pick between this and Titanic: The Legend Goes On for who did the worse rapping dog bit), it’s just a complete waste of anything and everything that is involved in making an animated film. For some reason, I went into this with a “how bad could this possibly be?” attitude, just for this to show me all the different ways it could be.
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