105 min | PG | July 29, 2022 | Warner Bros. Pictures
Superman’s dog has powers. When the Justice League gets captured, the only ones left to save them are a shelter full of misfit animals led by a cynical Bat-Hound. It is a Saturday-morning cartoon dressed up in a hundred-million-dollar costume.
Krypto the Superdog has everything. He has powers, a Fortress of Solitude, and Superman as his best friend. Then Superman starts dating Lois Lane and a hairless guinea pig named Lulu builds a machine that strips the Justice League of their abilities. Krypto loses his powers in the process and has to team up with a pack of shelter animals to rescue the heroes. The film is a superhero origin story wearing the skin of a pet-adoption comedy, and it is honest about wanting both the merchandising and the warmth.
Dwayne Johnson voices Krypto as a creature of pure entitled confidence who has never failed at anything. Kevin Hart plays Ace the Bat-Hound with a wounded backstory underneath the wisecracks, and the two run their usual buddy-comedy friction with the volume turned to maximum. Kate McKinnon does the most interesting work as Lulu, a guinea pig villain who treats world domination as a needy bid for Lex Luthor’s approval. John Krasinski and Keanu Reeves voice Superman and Batman as glorified cameos, with Reeves landing one good deadpan riff on Batman’s parentless gloom. Natasha Lyonne, Vanessa Bayer, and Diego Luna fill out the shelter pets, and their characters exist mostly to set up the next gag.
Jared Stern directs from a script he wrote with John Whittington, and the construction is competent and airless. The animation runs at a constant sprint, with the camera whip-panning between heroes and cutting on every punchline so no joke gets room to breathe. The color design is loud and primary, all candy reds and kryptonite greens, built to read on a toy aisle. The set pieces are staged with energy and no surprise, hitting every beat the team-up formula demands in the order it demands them. The film mistakes speed for invention.
What is left is a machine that does its job. The voice cast commits, the gags arrive on schedule, and the lesson about adopting shelter animals gets delivered with a bow on it. The film never trusts a quiet moment, so the emotional beats land with the same frantic delivery as the slapstick. It wants to be a real superhero story and a real comedy, and it settles for being a brand extension that moves fast enough to keep kids from looking away. The pieces work. The thing they build does not.