96 min | PG | November 10, 2021 | Paramount Pictures
A lonely girl in a cramped Manhattan apartment adopts a tiny red puppy from a magical rescuer, then wakes up to find he has grown into a ten-foot dog she cannot possibly hide. The city panics and a biotech CEO comes hunting. The premise is sweeter than anything the film does with it.
Emily Elizabeth is a scholarship student who does not fit in at her Manhattan private school. Her mother leaves town for work and parks her with Casey, an uncle who cannot manage his own life. In a pop-up tent run by a man named Mr. Bridwell, she finds a tiny red puppy and takes him home. She wishes for him to grow big and strong, and overnight he does. He becomes a ten-foot dog in a small apartment, and the city wants answers. The film frames a story about a lonely kid and the thing that loves her as a logistics problem to be chased through the streets.
Darby Camp plays Emily Elizabeth with earnest commitment and carries the emotional load the script hands her. She sells the loneliness of the early scenes better than the writing earns it. Jack Whitehall plays the uncle Casey as a bumbling man-child whose relentless improvisation grows exhausting. John Cleese appears as Mr. Bridwell for a few minutes and supplies the only real magic in the film. Tony Hale plays Zack Tieran, the biotech CEO who wants the dog for gene research, as a nervous corporate weasel who never reads as a threat. Izaac Wang grounds the picture as the neighbor kid Owen Yu and gives the most natural performance among the young cast.
Walt Becker directs from a screenplay by Jay Scherick, David Ronn, and Blaise Hemingway, and the seams of the committee show in every transition. The central effect is the central problem. Clifford is a computer-generated dog who never occupies the same physical space as the human actors. The light on his digital fur stays soft and even while the New York streets around him shift and harden, so he reads as a painting laid over the plate. The editing cuts away from the dog at the exact moments that would require him to touch the world, and the chase sequences move on adrenaline rather than geography. The score pushes sentiment into scenes that have not built it.
There is a tender film buried in the idea of a kid whose love makes the thing she loves impossible to hide. Clifford keeps reaching for that film and then retreating into slapstick and a villain plot it does not need. The dog is designed to be adorable and lands the gag a few times, and the youngest viewers will stay in their seats. Everyone older will feel the machinery working. The film mistakes scale for wonder and motion for feeling, and it never finds the warmth its source material gives away for free.