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Dog Man Movie Review

Dog Man is a 2024 animated family comedy film directed by Peter Hastings and starring Pete Davidson among others. It’s a pretty solid, though limited in appeal DreamWorks flick.

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“Get away from him, you fish!“

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When a police officer and his faithful police dog get injured in the line of duty, a harebrained but life-saving surgery fuses the two of them together – and Dog Man is born. As Dog Man learns to embrace his new identity, he must stop feline supervillain Petey the Cat from cloning himself and going on a crime spree. Based on the hugely popular titular series of comics, this film was definitely intended for children and their parents more so than fans of animation. It’s such a good concept that it is pretty much perfect for kids.

Only a child could think of this premise of a man and a dog being mixed together into one, but an adult did think of this and it’s brilliant. The entire film very much has that tone and feel of a kid drawing all of this up and thinking it on their own and this made the movie utterly endearing. It’s difficult to at least not appreciate the flick on that basic imaginative level.

But my issue watching it as an adult is that its hectic pace made it overly frenetic. The action is overwhelming and the third act was especially forgettable and nowhere near as interesting as the rest of the picture. It’s a breezily short flick for better and for worse. The energy is at first commendable, but eventually it caused me whiplash.

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Let’s talk about the characters. They made this movie as fun as it is. The titular Dog Man is actually not the highlight. He wasn’t properly developed at all. He worked based on the genius concept alone and he was very likable, but he needed more cooking in the oven for sure. Chief is a lot of fun and I loved his voice. The voice acting in this movie is stupendous across the board. Flippy the Fish was strange and appearing way too late in the game to make a bigger impact.

The standout is obviously Petey. He is the main nemesis in the story as this evil scientist of sorts. This orange cat was so well voiced by Davidson and actually funny at times. Lil’l Petey also worked and I loved the paternal dynamic between the two, though this relationship was very generic in the context of animated films undeniably.

Dog Man is worth seeing especially for its visual style, which is just lovely. The movie has a similar style of the ‘Captain Underpants’ movie (and these two films are of similar quality overall), but I preferred this one overall due to its more polished nature, uniquely simplistic character designs and a rather vintage look to it that made it immensely charming.

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The visuals are, yes, amazing. But the score is also very good, the movie’s humor is frequently quite solid and the dialogue is serviceable. Its roster of characters was undoubtedly a stellar one. I just wished that the overall screenplay was better and more sophisticated and the film felt too episodic in nature due to it being based on not one, not two, but three different issues.