Most children indulge in the occasional revenge fantasy. Imagine if a famous movie star decided to be your best friend – right after your actual best friend stopped talking to you. Or how about if MI5 got in touch with you because they needed a kid to help out with a top secret mission? Or what if you trained an enormous pack of assorted sizes of dogs to be your best friends, and they did your bidding and took down all your enemies and stole diamonds for you? This latter scenario is essentially the premise of the new film from Luc Besson, and it’s as wacky as it sounds.
Caleb Landry Jones plays Doug, our luckless protagonist, whose life is such an unimaginably relentless shitshow that he retreats entirely from humanity and holes up in an abandoned school with a pack of dozens of canine chums. The doggos’ rapport with Doug is so strong that it borders on psychic. They understand English perfectly. They are as happy tiptoeing into a wealthy older woman’s bedroom to silently lift an expensive necklace from her nightstand as they are gripping a local crime lord’s nutsack in their vice-like jaws.
But Doug isn’t just the ringleader of a group of miracle pups. A wheelchair user since midway through his wildly violent and dysfunctional childhood, he pivots to performing as a drag artist after an unsuccessful job-hunting montage set to Eurythmics’ Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This). Thereafter he divides his time between crooning Édith Piaf and Marlene Dietrich numbers and supervising his gang of canine criminals as they commit various jewel heists. He’s a multitasker.
Now, if you close your mind to the possibilities of film and write off imaginative gambits as “ludicrous” without ever having really given a bold vision a chance, it’s not great; cinema should be an art where the ostensibly ludicrous can take flight and flourish. All that said, and all due respect to the originality and commitment displayed here, but this is as ludicrous a film as you’ll see all year, maybe ever. I’m sure there’s a way to make this theoretically fun premise work better, but regrettably Besson hasn’t found it.
Besson reached the height of his popularity in the 1990s with films such as Léon and The Fifth Element, but has since faced rape allegations by an actor who worked with him on Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, before being cleared of all charges. Dogman is the intended comeback, and it’ll certainly make you sit up and take notice. Unfortunately, once it has your attention, you simply can’t look away – and not in a good way.
• Dogman screened at the Venice film festival.
