The Insultingly Convoluted Robin Williams/John Travolta Buddy Comedy Old Dogs Is So Fucking Stupid and Terrible That It's Great!
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2009’s Old Dogs is a curious beast: a wacky comedy that only wants to make audiences laugh with a non-stop parade of spectacular stupidity that’s hilarious for all the wrong reasons.
We’re all familiar with unintentionally hilarious dramas but is it possible for a movie to be accidentally uproarious when it’s explicitly going for laughs? OldDogs suggests it is.
I experienced a sort of double laughter throughout Old Dogs. I would laugh at the transcendent stupidity of every achingly idiotic gag and bit of frenetic slapstick, and then I laughed at myself for being stupid enough to find any of this legitimately laugh out loud funny for any reason.
In that respect it reminded me of the similarly stupid Boat Trip, which I have not seen in a while and would have a hard time revisiting considering that stars Cuba Gooding Jr. and Horatio Santa have both been accused of sex crimes.
2009’s Old Dogs should be similarly tough to watch since stars Robin Williams, Bernie Mac and Kelly Preston all died young, dramatic deaths that left their adoring fans shocked and distraught. Old Dog also features disgraced actress Lori Loughlin in a supporting role and is dedicated to Travolta’s son Jett, who died the year it was released.
Old Dogs is consequently shrouded in tragedy yet I did not have a hard time guffawing at lowbrow nonsense involving beloved performers who devastated the world with their dramatic, premature deaths.
According to the IMDB, Old Dogs was filmed as an R-rated 109 minute comedy for very stupid adults with the minds of sub-par children but after disastrous test screenings was trimmed down to a PG family film running a scant 89 minutes, 4 or 5 of which are devoted to the end credits.
Old Dogs was neutered but remnants of the raunchy comedy remain. The PG-rated Disney family was, for example, largely and unsuccessfully sold on the image of lilliputian li’l Seth Green in the arms of a giant ape with a look of pure, abject terror on his face as he contemplates the unspeakable agony that would ensue if this powerful, deadly beast were to succeed in sexually assaulting him.
I’m not sure why Disney chose to focus monomaniacally on this image/gag. I personally would have played up the pairing of Robin Williams and John Travolta more than the specter of simian sexual assault but the bit must have killed in test screenings so it somehow made it into a PG Disney movie for kids.
You’ve got to give the movie credit: it was sold as a comedy in which it is heavily implied that a character played by Seth Green is terrified of being man-handled and sexually defiled by a giant ape and it is, in fact, a a comedy in which it is heavily implied that a character played by Seth Green is terrified of being man-handled and sexually defiled by a giant ape. That’s why it won the Accuracy in Advertising Oscar at the 2010 Academy Awards.
In Old Dogs real-life friends Robin Williams and John Travolta play Charlie Reed and Dan Rayburn respectively. They’re longtime buddies who are also partners in a successful sports marketing firm that’s about to seal a big deal with a consortium of Japanese businessmen apparently left over from a xenophobic broad business comedy from the 1980s.
Old Dogs has an undeniably retro feel. You’ve heard of Three Men and a Baby? Old Dogs would like you to meet Two Men and Two Children, which is pretty much the same but way stupider.
Dan’s go-to move in negotiations is to tell the folks he’s dealing with a deeply humiliating story from his buddy and partner’s past, like one in which he got blackout drunk and had “Fremont” tattooed on his chest instead of “Free Man”, something Travolta’s slick business phony would have prevented if he wasn’t such a sociopath.
During that debauched vacation, Williams’ Charlie ends up getting very briefly married to the gorgeous Vicki Greer (Preston). Old Dogs serves as yet another reminder that even when she had nothing to work with and played a role that made no sense Kelly Preston still absolutely lit up the screen. She was a magnetic performer who shines even in a movie as spectacularly, staggeringly dumb and incompetent as this one.
Seven years after very briefly marrying and then un-marrying Charlie, Vicki pops back into his staid, buttoned-up life with two important, overlapping bits of business.
She’s about to go to jail for two weeks AND Charlie is the father of her seven year old twins. Charlie wants Vicki back so he volunteers to look after the children while she does her time on the grounds that his best friend and business partner help him.
Depending on the scene and the screenplay’s needs, Charlie and Dan are either impossibly, comically naive when it comes to parenting and children or naturals with a keen understanding of the emotional needs of young people.
I would NOT want to be on the receiving end of this giant ape’s ferocious sexual desire.
One moment Williams’ Charlie is so intimidated by the prospect of unstructured free time with the daughter he never knew that he has a flamboyant puppeteer played by Bernie Mac turn him into what is essentially a human puppet/robot controlled by others. The next he’s patiently teaching his son to ride a two-wheeler in what feels like the space of two hours.
Incidentally, when you have a character whose defining characteristics are that they are uptight, unimaginative and have no connection to children or their inner child, Robin Williams is DEFINITELY who you are going to want to cast.
Old Dogs was edited with a machete. Transitions and characterization were destroyed with extreme prejudice, leaving behind a series of frenetic slapstick set-pieces duct-taped together with sticky sentimentality.
When Charlie gets a spray tan, for example, it’s depicted as an experience roughly as intense, invasive and destructive as being gassed in a Concentration Camp. Charlie’s traumatic experiences with tanning unintentionally gives him brown skin that causes an Indian man to mistake him for a fellow Indian and a Hispanic fellow to think he speaks Spanish.
If that sounds incredibly stupid, it is! EVERYTHING about Old Dogs is unbelievably dumb to the point that the film crosses a line somewhere and becomes a borderline genius goof on the convoluted nature of Hollywood comedies. It’s so ridiculously shameless that it becomes a weirdly inspired commentary on the convoluted idiocy of Hollywood comedy formula violently divorced from even the fuzziest notion of reality and plausibility.
The screenplay takes a tiny little half-joke like a senior citizen mistaking the insecure sports marketing wizards for grandparents and despite Dan clearly saying that he and his friend are not grandparents seemingly everyone in the film treats them like proud parents of parents all the same.
This woman married perhaps our most beloved actor. Also gave birth to Chet Haze
In another trademark bit, the kids mix up the men’s pills before Dan goes to hit on sexy translator Amanda (Lori Loughlin) at what turns out to be the meeting of a bereavement group and Charlie plays golf with his Japanese colleagues.
Judging by their subsequent behavior, the lead characters in a PG Disney family comedy take as many drugs as Hunter S. Thompson did in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas on a daily basis.
The pills cause Dan’s face to freeze in a ghoulish grin that simultaneously recalls the victims of The Joker’s Smylex in Batman and the dripping faces of all-American grotesques in Soundgarden’s “Black Hole Sun” video, only creepier.
he has fun!
Charlie, meanwhile, behaves like someone who has just taken all the drugs in the world after a lifetime as a teetotaler. But nothing in this impressively pudding-headed insult to the intelligence and judgment of the moviegoing public is as spectacularly misguided as the human puppet/robot scene.
By that point Charlie has already illustrated that he can spend time in the company of his children without weeping uncontrollably or shitting himself with fear and anxiety. Yet they still have Mac’s superstar puppeteer Jimmy Lunchbox transform him into a quasi-cyborg because otherwise he’d never be able to fake his way through a tea party with a little girl.
Scenes like that make me think that Old Dogs was written and directed by space aliens with only a passing familiarity with Earth and its inhabitants. It does not understand children or parenthood any better than its heroes do.
There are lots of dumb, high concept Hollywood comedies. Old Dogs might just be the dumbest.
I mean that as high praise.
In the end does it ultimately matter whether I was laughing with Old Dogs or at it? Am I deluding myself by thinking I have an ironic, cerebral appreciation of Old Dogs as a transcendent exercise in unintentional self-parody when I’m really just a half-wit who genuinely finds it funny?
I haven’t seen a movie this funny since The Wicker Man. While Old Dogs is ostensibly supposed to be funny I enjoyed it for reasons its makers never intended but I enjoyed it greatly all the same.
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