The question of whether Luc Besson has got his groove back is only going to annoy those who dispute any former groove-ownership. Besson himself might contend that box office success is in any case the sole criterion for assessing groove. At all events, this bizarre and macabre drama-thriller is watchable and Caleb Landry Jones gives an oddly engaging performance as Douglas Munrow, a wheelchair-using “Dogman”, questioned by police psychologist Evelyn (Jojo T Gibbs) after being arrested in full drag gear, smeared with blood, while at the wheel of a van filled with his “babies” – his dogs.
Murrow’s conversation with Evelyn reveals in flashback a childhood kept in a dog kennel by an abusive father, at whose hands a terrible injury was sustained; then there are poignant teen years in a children’s home where his eyes are opened to poetry by a Shakespeare-loving drama student who turns him into her greatest fan –and breaks his heart by leaving one day without saying goodbye. Murrow gets a grim job looking after a dog pound, and trains his canine inmates to attack on demand and get into rich people’s houses to steal jewellery in some outrageously silly heist scenes. And he does a drag show as Edith Piaf and Marlene Dietrich on weekends.
This really is an odd film – and is Besson right to believe, incidentally, that US jails still use great jangling metal keys on rings for cell doors as opposed to modern electronic fobs? Yet it’s amusing, as the spirit of The Phantom of the Opera is succeeded by that of Hannibal Lecter. Then there are the dogs themselves – the spectacle of dogs of all shapes and sizes running through the streets always looks funny rather than scary. (It is possible that Besson has studied Kornél Mundruczó’s Fulleresque movie White God, which has the same chaotic doggie rush.) It’s shallow and insouciant, adding up to precisely nothing at all, but carried off with panache.
• Dogman is on digital platforms from 11 March.
