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.
