I don’t think I’ve seen you give a movie an F yet.
I can PM them to you. In the meantime, Universal and Illumination are going to be releasing
Sing 2 just in time for Christmas, so to get myself ready, I will be revisiting the original movie soon. Now for the next Illumination film before that one...
The Secret Life of Pets (2016)
Distributor: Universal/Illumination Entertainment
Director: Chris Renaud
Cast: Louis C.K. (Max), Eric Stonestreet (Duke), Kevin Hart (Snowball), Jenny Slate (Gidget), Ellie Kemper (Katie), Lake Bell (Chloe), Dana Carvey (Pops), Hannibal Buress (Buddy), Bobby Moynihan (Mel), Tara Strong (Sweetpea), Steve Coogan (Ozone), Albert Brooks (Tiberius), Chris Renaud (Norman), Michael Beattie (Tattoo)
Runtime: 86 min.
MPAA rating: PG (action, some rude humor)
This movie is about a Jack Russell Terrier named Max who lives with his owner Katie in New York City. While his owner works, he stays in his apartment complex to socialize with the other pets including the pug Mel, the Dachshund Buddy, tabby cat Chloe and parakeet Sweetpea. His perfect world is turned upside down when Katie comes home with a big shaggy Newfoundland mix dog named Duke, who he takes an immediate disliking towards. While trying to slit each others’ throats, they are arranged to be taken to the pound, but are saved by a white bunny named Snowball, who leads an army of abandoned pets called the “Flushed Pets”. When Gidget, a white Pomeranian who’s harboring a crush on Max, learns that Max and Duke are missing, she assembles a team of his friends to find them. So, can Gidget’s team find Max and Duke and safely get them home, and can Snowball learn that there is hope for him yet?
Having made out like bandits on the
Despicable Me series, the team at Illumination proved themselves a formidable animation studio that would go on to do continuations on
Despicable Me, that being
Despicable Me 2 and
Minions, which both would gross over $1 billion. With a foundation made, they would then have an idea for a movie about pets. Trivia is they were going to go with a murder mystery, but then decided to do something a little more relatable. This would also be the first movie that Illumination would do that had nothing to do with
Despicable Me and was not a Dr. Seuss adaptation.
This movie had an idea that you’d probably be able to relate to: what do your pets do when you’re not home? It may not have been the most original idea, and you could probably label it as “
Toy Story with pets”, but how did it fare?
Well it’s hardly a perfect movie, as there is there’s some pros and cons I will discuss.
The movie begins with setting up the idea of what life is like living in New York City. I do admire this as New York is my kind of town. From there it draws on your existing knowledge and relatable familiarities with domesticated pets to make it entertaining. We see life from several different pets’ perspectives along with the differences between dogs and cats which makes up the majority of its appeal.
However, the story does have a glaring issue: the story, as it is, is rather weak. The movie’s protagonists are a Jack Russell Terrier named Max, who now has to share his owner’s apartment with a big shaggy Newfoundland mix named Duke. Almost like how an originally only child now has to deal with the fact they now have a little sibling, being told from a pets angle. Thing is though, coming within the same year as
Zootopia, the movie’s feels more kid-targeted than something for the whole family. Then there is also the fact the movie is not about Katie, but rather Max and his new roommate Duke.
Allow me to make an analogy. When you were reading something like say, "Calvin and Hobbes", the character you were supposed to care about was Calvin, not Hobbes. There was a reason for this: while Calvin could do a whole bunch of different things where he doesn’t need Hobbes, Hobbes’s… whole life is Calvin. While Calvin could do several things that didn’t need Hobbes beside him, Hobbes was probably sitting on Calvin’s bed waiting for him to come home. The reason for that is because Hobbes was just a stuffed toy and doesn’t exist unless Calvin was there; his life was that if Calvin was supposed be a troublemaker, Hobbes was like a manifestation of Calvin’s conscience. Calvin was easily the more appealing character, you probably didn’t want to know if Hobbes was going around having adventures while Calvin was not there.
Now back to the story. The movie has the idea of “what does Max do if Katie is out working?” The answer seems to be “Not much”. In another example like
Toy Story, while you have the idea that Woody and Buzz Lightyear don’t depend on Andy to have lives, it feels very much like in a hard contrast to the movie’s title, Max really doesn’t have a life away from Katie. We can say Duke has a similar backstory and that illustrates in issue I’m getting to. You get to see the antics of their neighboring pets which pick up the slack and make things more interesting and likely where kids will find appeal and mature viewers will get laughs out of if they are seeing the movie without kids. An adventure does unfold as Max and Duke have to bond in order to return home, but one almost wonders if the movie would have been stronger if they jettisoned the pets angle completely and made the movie about Katie.
The movie’s animation style is very nice as they give people a multi-layered angle of what it’s like living in New York City. While limited to what a dog could see many times, like my owner’s apartment, an alley, Central Park, that sort of thing, they do make wide glimpses of the city as a whole and that makes for something appealing. I will admit the “Flushed Pets’” lair makes something much more interesting and much more appealing than the humdrum of the domesticated pets. The Flushed Pets aspect does give a wider assortment than simple dogs and cats which is definitely something I liked and appreciated. The animation does its job well and I definitely can say gives you something nice to look at.
You probably want me to tell you about the characters. Where to start… how about I start with Max and Duke. Max is supposed to be the main character and Duke is his co-star. But what else can I say about them? I don’t know, as I don’t remember seeing an animated movie where the two leading characters were this terminally boring. The movie’s writing doesn’t suggest that Max and Duke are really supposed to be anything more than dogs. They are not supposed to be like Katie’s husband and child or anything, they’re just… pets and that’s it. What seems to be a prominent way for them to bond is probably the easiest way imaginable: they have a feast after they crash a hot dog factory. And because these two flatlines are such a prominent part of the movie, that creates a void as I honestly did not care if they got home or died trying to get back. The other pets, on the other hand, are a lot more appealing and they do their best to pick up the slack that Max and Duke leave for them. For one we have Gidget, a white Pomeranian who is harboring a crush on Max. I do have mixed feelings on her as if you understand what women are actually interested in, her crush on Max is not believable as you don’t buy any spark between them; you have no idea what she sees in him. If you ignore that aspect though, she does get some reasonably entertaining bits that help matters. Chloe is a tabby cat that is more snobby and finicky about things, she is probably the most entertaining character for those of us who prefer cats to dogs. You also have Buddy, a Dachshund and Mel, a hyperactive pug who are more like comedy relief characters which is all they really have in the tank. Sweetpea is a parakeet who seems like his job is to be cute. Norman the guinea pig is really just a running joke about how he’s looking for his apartment, it doesn’t add up to much. Tiberius the Hawk tries to help Gidget in her quest to find Max but just feels misjudged. They don’t do anything with this aspect of the story; as in he doesn’t make any kind of point of why he can be seen as dangerous when the world tends to want cats or dogs, he’s just… an aid for Gidget. The movie’s villain is Snowball, the white bunny who leads the “Flushed Pets” an underground gang of pets who have been neglected/abandoned/surrendered by their owners and now want revenge against humanity. Kevin Hart really helps with this whole spiel and his delivers his comic timing to give the story some life. The pet thing isn’t supposed to be a metaphor for anything, it’s just cute pets doing things for those of us who love our pets and love to see them in action. You will probably come away from this movie with at least one favorite character.
I’ll also add that before the movie was shown in theaters, we would see a short cartoon called “Mower Minions” which was about five of Gru’s pill-shaped henchmen who want to buy a blender to make some banana smoothies and do so with some stolen tools to do yardwork at a retirement home. This cartoon is definitely funny and is always fun to see the Minions in their non-speaking mayhem; while I wouldn’t say it’s worth going to the theater to see it alone it makes for a very amusing four minutes.
The Secret Life of Pets is harmless and will hold appeal to children who are looking for some cute pet antics that doesn’t demand deep engagement in the story, or adults who have an adoration for pets and love seeing them. While I do think something like this probably would work better as a cartoon series rather than a movie, it has enough charm and humor value for me to give it a mild recommendation. Hardly a movie meant to win awards, but it’s reasonably diverting and not meant to be anything more than that. And the fact it made almost $900 million worldwide means it definitely found peoples’ interests; it was almost as much as the later
Despicable Me movies.
Now that this review is done, let’s see if
Sing can do better.
The Secret Life of Pets (2016)
TreyVore rates it: C+
How you holding up?