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.

A Dog's Way Home (2019) - Movie Review

Remember what I was saying at the beginning of the year about how 2018 was the year of getting our shit together? Well, we’re barely into March and I’m already seeing signs that that progression isn’t lasting. I mean, nothing says "we’ve learnt nothing" more than taking one of the more misguided releases of 2017, A Dog’s Breakfast Purpose, and deciding that it needed not one but two follow-ups this year. Both adapted from the writer of the original source material at that, with the sequel to Purpose coming out later this year, and a separate adaptation in cinemas right now. Knowing my now-prominent axe to grind when it comes to talking animal movies, and my position that Purpose is awful in its own special way, I can’t say I’m expecting a lot out of this one. Thankfully, this film didn’t go below my expectations; if anything, this turned out better than it had any right to.