91 min | PG | June 9, 2020 | Lionsgate
A twelve-year-old inventor builds a gadget that lets him hear his dog’s thoughts. His parents are quietly splitting up, so naturally the dog becomes the family therapist. The premise writes the lesson before the kid plugs anything in.
Oliver Reed is a twelve-year-old inventor. He builds a device for a school science contest that links his brain to his dog Henry’s. The gadget works, and Oliver starts hearing Henry talk back. The bigger problem at home is that his parents, Lukas and Ellen, are heading toward divorce. Think Like a Dog is a family comedy that uses a talking-dog premise to hand a child the job of repairing the adults around him. The science is a delivery system for a lesson about listening.
Gabriel Bateman plays Oliver as a bright, lonely kid who trusts machines more than people. He carries the human scenes with an earnestness that keeps the gimmick from going sour. Todd Stashwick voices Henry with a dry, knowing patience that lands the film’s better jokes. Josh Duhamel plays Lukas as a distracted father, and Megan Fox plays Ellen as a wife who has stopped pretending things are fine. Kunal Nayyar turns Mr. Mills into broad comic relief and pushes the energy too hard. The parents have the most interesting material and the least screen time.
Gil Junger directs from a script he wrote with John J. Strauss. The talking-dog effect relies on tight close-ups and minimal mouth movement, which keeps Henry expressive without tipping into cartoon. Junger shoots the suburban scenes in flat, sunny light that matches the film’s untroubled surface. The contest subplot reaches across to a young competitor named Xiao, played by Hou Minghao, and the editing cuts between the two locations to inflate the stakes. The score telegraphs every emotional beat before the actors arrive at it. The craft is clean and anonymous.
Think Like a Dog knows exactly what it is and never reaches past it. The premise promises a boy who can hear his dog, and the film spends its energy on the parents’ marriage instead. That choice is the smart one, because the divorce thread carries real feeling and the dog mostly narrates it. Bateman and Stashwick make the central friendship believable enough to anchor the sentiment. It is a tidy, undemanding picture built to comfort kids and reassure the adults watching with them.