Mangy Mutt
In a perfect world this movie would meet a grim fate behind the barn.
Woof Woof Daddy
Director: Lu Ke • Writers: Zhang Hongyi, Wen Ya
Starring: Aaron Kwok, Lyric Lan, Darren Wang, Isabelle Huang, Xing Yunjia
China • 1hrs 45mins
Opens Hong Kong May 23 • I
Grade: D+
Honest to god, I could not tell you if the CGI dog in Woof Woof Daddy | 來自汪星的你, AKA My Dad Is a Dog (and I am not kidding about those titles), is supposed to be photorealistic or if it’s supposed to look like a (bad) cartoon. If it’s the former, then I guess it would be to appeal to slightly older children – I don’t know, eight or 10 – and families? If it’s the latter then maybe it’s for younger kids – two to six – and families? Whatever the intended target demo, really, who in the unholy hell is going to watch this? Don’t get me wrong. Body swap and talking animal movies are the workhorses of family entertainment: Big, Soul, Your Name, Babe, Paddington, Stuart Little, the list goes on. So it makes sense to put them both in one movie. Hence, Woof Woof Daddy. Director Lu Ke – who hasn’t made a film since the 2012 horror film Run (uh oh) – does a pedestrian job with this time-travelling family dramedy, about little Jiang Lu growing up hard and lonely after she loses the beloved father she adores at the tender age of nine. This feels like one of those movies an industry veteran makes so they have something to show their kids/grandkids (Martin Scorsese with Hugo, Idris Elba with The Jungle Book, The Lesser Canadian Ryan, Reynolds with Detective Pikachu). But woops, this one’s a turkey. Saccharine, predictable, cheap-looking and mostly just mind-bogglingly dumb, Woof Woof Daddy’s dog jokes write themselves.
So where’s the dog?
Jiang Lu (Xing Yunjia) lives with her father, terrible but enthusiastic wannabe rock star Jiang Siwang (Aaron Kwok Fu-shing, mugging at a nuclear level) in a working class neighbourhood of a not-yet-ginormous mainland manufacturing town. He works at the local sugar (?) processing plant, though he’s about to be laid off with dozens of others. They’re “real” people; not rich, but not starving, living in a warm, happy community and sharing an unbreakable bond. Guess where this is going? On his way to an amusement park for Lu’s birthday Siwang has a save-the-cat moment and rescues a trapped puppy, gets hit by a passing truck and drowns. Because no one bothers to consider her other parent, Lu is left all alone.
About 20 years later, Siwang is reborn as a… Shiba Inu? A dingo? A Heinz 57? Anyway, he’s kind of orange and finds his way to the now-adult Lu (Lyric Lan Yingying, Dante Lam’s The Rescue), who’s taken after dear old dad by becoming a singer. But she’s a bitter, hard woman; the sweet, loving girl Siwang knew is gone. Her career is in the toilet after a single hit song, her agent/boyfriend Qintian (Darren Wang Talu, Wolf Hiding, No More Bets) is forcing her to take advice from influencer Miss C (Isabelle Huang Ling), who – hold on to your hats – he’s cheating on her with. After a bit of a fight, Lu accepts the mystery dog that seems to know all about her into her home and life, and in the end finds a way to reconcile the memory of her father with reality. Awwww.
Woof Woof Daddy raises so. Many. Questions. As a few: 1) Why did Siwang have to wait two decades to reincarnate? 2) How do you not notice your dog is hitting the turn signal on your motorbike, or responding to human queries and commands without thinking, “Huh, fancy that?” 3) Did anyone care if the mouth movement and song lyrics even came close to matching during Lu’s “performance”? 4) Was there no cash left in the budget to buy fake moustaches for Wang and Huang to twirl? 5) Why is your dancing dog not your entire show? 6) Did Kwok get paid per pratfall sound effect or did his hamminess come at a flat rate? 7) Why is this movie?
This kind of goofiness has hit screens in some form or another a million times, in all corners of the globe. Woof Woof Daddy’s MO or its mere existence or its corny messages about missing a parent isn’t the offence here. It’s the dumbness of it all that’s so agonising. The highjinks are eye-rolling in their half-assedness, the OTT characterisations sap any tension from Lu’s march towards acceptance of self, and the CGI dog is just distracting. Like I said, neither convincing enough to look like a real dog nor fake enough to be an obvious live action-animation hybrid. And to add insult to injury the closing frames pretty much undo the entire story, making the 100 minutes invested in this dreck moot. Woof is an understatement. — DEK