Isle of Dogs


0.5/4

Starring (voices): Bryan Cranston, Koyu Rankin, Edward Norton, Bob Balaban, Bill Murray, Jeff Goldblum, Greta Gerwig, Frances McDormand

Rated PG-13 for Thematic Elements and Some Violent Images

Wes Anderson movies are “love it or hate it” affairs.  His fans all but worship his films while his detractors can’t stand him.  I fall into the latter category.  What some see as quirky and whimsy, I see as pretentious and elitist.  I hated “The Royal Tenenbaums” and “Moonrise Kingdom.”  I feel exactly the same about “Isle of Dogs.”

An outbreak of dog flu has surged through a Japanese city.  In response, the tyrannical mayor Kobayashi (Kunichi Nomura) has banned all the dogs to a island of trash.  Six months later. The mayor’s orphaned ward Atari (Rankin) has commandeered a plane to find his beloved dog Spots (Live Schrieber).  He crash lands, and a host of dogs helps him search for his owner.

In addition to being self-congratulatory to the extreme and unbearably boring, “Isle of Dogs” is a mess.  The plot has more holes than Swiss cheese, and as a result, rarely makes sense.  Only one character, a stray dog named Chief (Cranston) has an arc, but it’s cliché and uninteresting.  And the character is one of those annoying hipsters that lives to be the contrarian.  On every subject.

Anderson has a lot of ideas, as always.  It’s just that none of them are any good.  For example, all the dogs are differing versions of the same name, the characters talk about “dog flu” and other quirky nonsense.  There are a few running gags (“gag” being the operative word), such as how Duke (Goldblum) is always spreading bizarre rumors, and so on.  In true hipster comedy fashion, this is just a collage of the quirkiest ideas Anderson has stirred into a pot that was rancid before it was even conceived.

There are two main problems I have with Wes Anderson (and a host of others that I won’t bother to mention).  First, his quirky details are completely divorced from reality.  The details about the story and the characters involved have no resemblance to human behavior.  No one talks or behaves the way they do in his movies.  As a result, it is impossible to identify with anyone in it.  For example, a dog named Nutmeg (Scarlett Johansson) advises Coach not to drink from a certain bucket of water.  Why?  “Because it has toxic chemicals in it.”  Or how one dog has weaponized teeth.

The other is the humor.  Or lack thereof.  I’ve heard his humor described as deadpan.  That’s fine.  But when you have a three-line joke with a ten second pause between each line, that’s just self-indulgent.  And they aren’t even jokes.  There are no turns to them, no satire or exaggeration.  They’re just non-sequiturs without any truth or point.

Anderson has always loved the oddballs.  What irritates me about his movies is that he’s laughing at the characters.  He’s making fun of them, and expects the audience to do so as well.  Watching his movies is like watching a freakshow and being expected to laugh at the characters for being freaks, yet somehow still sympathize with them.  What surprised me about this movie is that he views his characters with such contempt.  So not only are we expected to laugh at animal cruelty and abandonment, but we’re expected to laugh at them because we feel superior to them.  That’s not humor, it’s sadism.  And Anderson wants us to be complicit in it.

In a way, I feel bad for giving this such a vitriolic review.  There was clearly a lot of hard work that went into bringing Anderson’s vision to the screen, and the stop-motion animation is done well.  But the images are hit and miss.  Some are beautiful (if there’s one positive thing I can say to Anderson’s credit, it’s that he has a good eye for detail), while others are repugnant.  In the end, all those hours of work and creativity were wasted just to bring Anderson’s demented vision to the screen.

I can’t think of anyone with so much time on their hands that they feel they can waste 90 minutes of watching Wes Anderson congratulating himself on being an outsider.  The scariest thing about this movie is that there are people who like his movies (or want to seem cool by saying they do), and there are respected actors (which include everyone from Edward Norton to Yoko Ono) willing to waste their talents for his vanity.  Anderson must have some truly damaging pictures in his arsenal.

Trust me.  Don’t bother with this movie.  It’s not just bad.  It’s freaking awful.

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