The cute talking pigs of the Babe films taught audiences to love real animals with CGI human-talking mouths; I myself was always agnostic, finding them lacking in both the unadorned charm of live-action animals and the complete ingenuity of animations. But this brutally funny stoner comedy about four pottymouthed stray dogs on an incredible quest has changed my mind. You’ll believe a dog can talk – and be extremely abusive.
Writer-producer Dan Perrault, known chiefly for his true-crime docu-spoof American Vandal, and director, Josh Greenbaum, have created a cheerfully offensive comedy about stray dogs trekking across America, with their own issues around abuse, abandonment and emotional PTSD, as well as who to hump and when. I like to think they were inspired by the much-loved 1963 live-action Disney classic The Incredible Journey about the English bull terrier, yellow labrador and Siamese cat that trek 300 miles across the Canadian wilderness to get home. In the Disney film, however, none of the animals was in jail, trying to extend their prodigious genitals through the cell bars in a nailbiting quest to unhook the keys.
Will Ferrell voices Reggie, a sweetly optimistic little border terrier who doesn’t understand he is being abused by his owner, Doug (Will Forte), a shiftless pothead who has grown to hate Reggie interrupting him while he is trying to masturbate. Reggie is heartbreakingly enamoured with the game Doug always wants to play, “Fetch – Fuck!” in which he takes Reggie far away in his pickup, throws a ball for him, drives home contentedly alone and says “Fuck!” when the dog shows up hours or days later with the ball. Finally, Reggie is effectively abandoned and befriended by a streetsmart terrier, Bug (Jamie Foxx), an Australian shepherd called Maggie (Isla Fisher) and a lugubrious great dane, Hunter (Randall Park).
Reggie’s new canine compadres radicalise him, showing him how he has absorbed and normalised the cruelty of his human owner, how being a “stray” should be a badge of honour and how he must rise up against the humans. The scales fall from Reggie’s eyes and he is galvanised by a passionate new mission: to find his master and bite his penis off. His three friends follow, perhaps assuming their new friend will learn a life lesson in self-respect and rise above all the violence. Or perhaps Reggie will learn the life lesson but do the biting anyway.
It is an entirely outrageous film with a lot of bad-taste laughs along the way, and a bizarrely real dramatic impact when Reggie finally confronts Doug in the horrendous finale. This is a film that fiercely disrespects Marley and Me and, in a rare example of magnanimity and restraint, doesn’t attack the movie Cats. Homo sapiens get some rough treatment. In the immortal words of Snoop Dogg, who inevitably features on the soundtrack: “It’s a crazy, mixed-up world / It’s a Doggy Dogg world.”
• Strays is released on 17 August in Australia and the UK and on 18 August in the US.
