Film: Old Dogs
Director: Walt Becker
Writer: David Diamond & David Weissman
Actors: John Travolta, Robin Williams, Kelly Preston and Seth Green
Rating: *
You’d expect more from a John Travolta/ Robbin Williams’ film. But truth be told, Old Dogs is a mess. To call it a ramshackle product (let’s not even call it a film), with extremely unfunny sequences almost randomly put together, would still not tell you how bad it is.
Watching it with a select few film reviewers, the audience was hardly in ‘splits’. In fact when a few people did laugh, it was more out of desperation than anything else.
So there is the charmer Charlie (Travolta) and the softie Dan (Williams). Both lifetime best friends, who own a sports-marketing operation in New York and are at the verge of a very big deal with a Japanese company.
And then Dan meets his former wife for a day Vicki (Kelly Preston) and realises that he’s actually a father of twins. She’s to serve a few days in jail, and has planned on her best friend Jenna (Rita Wilson) to take care of the children.
But when Dan accidentally sends her to hospital by slamming the boot of the car on Jenna’s hands, he decides to take the responsibility of the children for that brief while. (By the way Jenna, whose hand gets mangled is a hand model. Talk about an excessively contrived script.}
And once the kids are in, the jokes just get worse. It increasingly turns into a cesspool of sorts, drawing in a series of crude, unwitting slapstick gags where uncle Charlie and papa Dan’s attempts to entertain the children end in humiliations.
So there’s a scene where an overlong exposure to spray tan turns Dan’s face a dark brown, where he’s confused to be from an India to a Mexican. There’s also an extremely unfunny and long joke where Charlie and Dan are mistaken to be grandparents.
Also an accidental mix-up of pills where Charlie’s lips get frozen into an extremely wide grin. Oh yeah, he’s at a bereavement ceremony.
The pills distort Dan’s perception and while he’s trying to impress his Japanese clients over golf, he lands up shooting the ball backwards into their groins.
Charlie and Dan are asked to move to Tokyo to seal the ‘big’ Japanese deal in the end. But of course Dan chooses family over it.
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