101 min | PG-13 | February 18, 2022 | United Artists Releasing
An Army Ranger drives a dead comrade’s dog down the Pacific coast to a funeral. Neither man nor animal is fit for polite society. The road is the only place that makes sense for either of them.
Jackson Briggs is a former Army Ranger desperate to deploy again. His brain injury keeps grounding him. To earn a recommendation, he agrees to transport Lulu, a Belgian Malinois who served alongside a fallen soldier, down the coast to the funeral. The dog is a weapon trained for war and broken by it, and so is Briggs. Channing Tatum and Reid Carolin build a road movie about two damaged veterans who happen to be different species.
Tatum plays Briggs as a man performing wellness for the people who can sign his paperwork. He grins and charms and lies about being fine, and the cracks show in the moments he thinks nobody watches. The dog, Lulu, is the better actor of the central pair. Her flinching, her aggression, and her refusal to be handled communicate trauma without a word of dialogue. The supporting roles stay brief. Jane Adams turns up as Tamara, a New Age healer, and Ethan Suplee plays Noah, a fellow veteran who reads Briggs faster than Briggs reads himself.
Tatum and Carolin direct their first feature together, and Carolin writes the screenplay from a story he built with Brett Rodriguez. The handheld camera stays close to Briggs in the truck cab and keeps Lulu in the frame even when she is the threat. The film leans on the Pacific Coast Highway as a visual engine, the open road promising a freedom that neither character can actually use. The problem is structural. The script swings from broad comedy to earnest meditation on PTSD without building a bridge between the two registers, so the funny scenes undercut the serious ones and the serious scenes deflate the jokes.
The film works best when it stops reaching for laughs and lets two wounded creatures sit in silence. Briggs needs the dog to certify him as functional, and the dog needs Briggs to stop treating her like equipment. That mutual recognition is the real subject, and the sincerity of it survives the tonal mess around it. Dog wants to be a comedy and an elegy at the same time and never decides which. It earns its quiet ending anyway.