In the mostly unfortunate genre of talking animals movies, there are several things that typically lead to creative failure. Among them are:
1) giving the animals the same intelligence and experiences as humans 2) an endless stream of poop-and-fart jokes 3) allowing the animals to do things real animals could never do.
"Marmaduke" does all of those, and then some.
Marmaduke (voice of Owen Wilson) is a lovable Great Dane who moves with his family from Kansas to Orange County when his master Phil (Lee Pace) gets a new job marketing for a pet-food company. His boss (William H. Macy) is a dog lover who loves to work at the dog park...barefoot.
Marmaduke, as the family does, has to adapt to his new surroundings and join the bark park pack, which is alphaed by a Rottweiler named Bosco (pipes of Kiefer Sutherland).
It's a simple-enough dog-out-of-water story, which is all well and good, but it gets a little tedious when we're getting movie after movie virtually identical to the ones before it, save for a single character.
But here's the thing: when you're doing a gimmick movie putting otherwise real animals in the real world, if you're going to allow them to talk, they have to talk like a dog would, which means there are certain things within the human world they'd know nothing about. Think "Toy Story," where reality is filtered through the experiences of toys. They generally know only what toys know.
But there's no time for messing with all of that, because all this Marmaduke movie needs are scenes where he surfs, and has parties (one wonders how with the lack of opposable thumbs he's able to work the turntable)--and don't you DARE forget the "Almost Famous" reference!
And don't forget your insulting plays on the name Marmaduke for Bosco to shout at him-Marmapuke and Marmadookie are the more creative ones--in other words, the kind of stuff we thought were clever with in third grade.
I do have to applaud two pieces of casting. One is getting the wonderful Judy Greer (" ") to play Debbie, the matriarch of the Marmaduke family. It's great to see her finally get a leading role, but also a little off-putting when her biggest acting work is reacting to her dog's flatulence.
The other is The Great Sam Elliott as Chupadogra (get it?), a somewhat feral Saint Bernard who is a legend among the dog park set.
But Macy is making one for the kids, and the rest of the voice talent features mostly recognizable names but are too generic to bother mentioning here.
Also remember the rule about how bad movies cheat by sticking a dance sequence in at the end, thereby hoping to leave the audience feeling upbeat when the rest of the film stunk? Check.
And before you tell me these movies aren't made for me, I can agree. They're made for my kids, who both claimed to enjoy it, but I've learned their "I'm bored" tells. Their behavior was more "Furry Vengeance" than "Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs"; in other words, not good.
When the best thing you can say about a film is that it's not worse than "Garfield," you really don't have much, and that's about all you can say for "Marmaduke."