A Very Silly Movie About Some Very Good Dogs

Early on in the raunchy talking-animals comedy Strays, a montage plays of four dogs humping inanimate lawn ornaments, guzzling beer leaking from trash bags, and bonding over a plan to bite off a man’s genitals. It’s an inartfully staged sequence, packed with sophomoric jokes and enough f-bombs to rival a Quentin Tarantino film. On the other hand: Will you look at those sweet, scruffy faces! Those little paws! Sure, their CGI-ed mouths appear a bit strange and the canines do not seem to be making direct eye contact with one another, but they each deserve belly rubs and every single treat ever. How can anyone dislike a scene in which the goodest dogs are having the best time? Indeed, halfway through my screening, I glanced at my notes and realized that I’d drawn a series of smiley faces.

That’s all to say that Strays knows what it’s doing with its choice to follow a furry foursome, which saves the film from being an exercise in pure nonsense—at least for the dog-lovers in the audience. Hollywood makes plenty of absurd movies built on underbaked premises: This year, Cocaine Bear, Mafia Mamma, and 65 come to mind. Amid such a mediocre pack, you could do worse than a 93-minute film that, for all its obscene humor and gratuitous violence, contains a softhearted center about—what else?—the unconditional love of pets.

Then again, you could also do much better—and much funnier. Strays, despite being billed as an “R-rated comedy with bite,” is rather tame. (Sorry.) The story follows a Border Terrier named Reggie (voiced by Will Ferrell), who, after being abandoned by his pot-smoking loser owner, Doug (Will Forte), meets Bug (Jamie Foxx as a tough Boston terrier), Maggie (Isla Fisher as a smart Australian shepherd), and Hunter (Randall Park as a shy Great Dane). The group shows Reggie how to live without human supervision, and teaches him to accept that Doug was never kind to him—a revelation that kicks off a journey to make the former owner pay for his abuse.

Along the way, the four get involved in predictable misbehavior—drug-induced hijinks, gross-out gags—while indulging in endless dog-based jokes. The best ones involve highly specific jabs at dog-movie tropes, including a cameo that sends up A Dog’s Purpose and a scene involving a Homeward Bound–like, sentimental “narrator dog.” The worst involve asinine puns: At one point, the group debates what “regular style” means when it comes to dog sex.

[Read: What do dogs know about us?]

The director, Josh Greenbaum, isn’t trying to deliver the winsome charms of his last effort, Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar, a comedy about best friendship and coastal vacations that’s already becoming a cult classic. Instead, it strives for a not unpleasant brain-numbing effect on par with, say, falling down an online rabbit hole of cute animal videos. Strays achieves that result, to an extent. By the final act of the film, I had stopped taking notes altogether, defeated by the relentlessness of the movie’s profanity and poop-based imagery. I—and the audience I was with—laughed at a scene involving Maggie attempting to tell knock-knock jokes, only for the other dogs to respond with a chorus of woofs. I chuckled when Hunter said the word howling because he could not actually howl, and when Bug yelled “Fuck you, leaf!” at a leaf.

At the time, I could not really explain why this was so funny. In an attempt to pull myself together, I started thinking about what it meant that I was enjoying Strays; is this what “original” means now, for films to be made out of scenes that seem destined to become memes? Are the movie gods balancing the scales of narrative richness after the highs of Barbie and Oppenheimer? Has the relentless crush of being too online made me the perfect target to appreciate the juvenile humor of cute characters cursing? Should every movie just star dogs? Would it work with cats? (Not if they’re played by humans.)

I know: I’ve overthought Strays. The movie is, in the end, deeply unserious and completely mindless, but still strangely sweet. It is late-summer schlock, featuring an ensemble of four-legged animals who have done nothing wrong ever in their lives. It’s a reminder, if nothing else, that an adorable protagonist embarking on a hero’s journey goes a long way. It doesn’t matter if Strays is good. Because those dogs? They’re very good dogs.