93 min | R | August 18, 2023 | Universal Pictures
Reggie is a sweet, dim dog who reads his owner’s abuse as love. A foul-mouthed stray named Bug sets him straight and aims him at revenge. A dog cursing is funny exactly once, and the movie does it a hundred times.
Reggie is a small dog who worships his owner. Doug is the deadbeat who hates him. Reggie reads every cruelty as a game and every kick as affection. When Doug abandons him far from home, Reggie meets a foul-mouthed stray named Bug who explains the obvious. The two set off on a revenge mission with an anatomically specific goal, and the film runs on a single engine. Adorable dogs say filthy things.
Will Ferrell voices Reggie as relentless naivete. He plays the optimism straight, which is the smartest choice in the film. Jamie Foxx voices Bug as a fast-talking cynic who hides his abandonment issues behind bravado. Isla Fisher and Randall Park fill out the pack as Maggie and Hunter, and Park gives Hunter a nervous sweetness under a cone of shame. Will Forte plays Doug in the flesh as pure lowlife, all greasy hair and contempt. Sofia Vergara turns up as a talking couch named Dolores during a mushroom trip, and the cameo lands the surreal note the rest of the movie keeps reaching for.
Josh Greenbaum directs from a script by Dan Perrault. Greenbaum shoots the world at dog height, and the low angle does real work. It crops human faces into looming threats and leaves the dogs as the only full characters in frame. The performances are real dogs with digital mouths grafted on, and the seam shows. The lips move with a rubbery precision that never matches the voices, and the effect sits in the uncanny gap between live action and cartoon. Perrault builds the film as a road trip, which gives the one joke a series of new rooms to repeat itself in.
The problem is that the joke does not grow. A cute dog swearing is funny once. By the tenth time the contrast flattens into a rhythm, and the raunch starts doing the work that wit should be doing. The film knows this and tries to buy back goodwill with a real streak of warmth about loyalty and the lies abused animals tell themselves. That warmth is the best thing here, and it arrives in a movie too committed to its gimmick to trust it. Strays wants to be a filthy comedy and a tender one, and it never decides which.