Remember being a child who just discovered the F-word, and you couldn’t wait to say it out loud? You’d go to your friends and add it to every sentence imaginable while feeling empowered and confident at your impropriety. That’s the level of humor that director Josh Greenbaum, and screenwriter Dan Perrault, string out for an hour-and-a-half in this raunchy R-rated talking animal comedy where the punchline of every sentence is, “Hehe, that dog said the F-word.” I would say these jokes, if you’re not in the single-digits of your life, may grow weary after 20 minutes when Jamie Foxx’s Boston Terrier, Bug, takes centerstage, and the emphases of every statement with a curse word or a dirty statement pulled from any 2000’s teen-sex comedy. 

The premise is cute—what if the dog of every pet owner could talk? Unlike the talking animal films most of us grew up with, these dogs can curse. They have their own opinions on the humor world, and they often can’t stop peeing on everything as a sense of ownership. Yet, Strays (2023) has nothing else to offer except cute dogs (aided with CGI lips and facial expressions) talking like they’re in a Scorsese film. The bit becomes tiresome, as the narrative seems to meander for a good second act before trying to force an apotheosis in relation to abusive pet owners and the sad reality of how many dogs simply want to please their owners. The emotional catharsis is cheaply drawn and half-realized, as the film wants to make you laugh at the adorableness of a crass, low-brow comedy that recycles its shtick while absorbing the seriousness of the emotional abuse dogs suffer at the hands of apathetic owners. 

The film is, in some respect, a revenge fantasy for the dogs that have suffered at the hands of every bad pet owner. Sadly, the film never earns that emotional reckoning, outside of seeing a poor helpless dog with big wide eyes looking for affection. The trick is unearned in a film that spends most of its runtime floundering in the meandering plot and mechanics that are executed so erratically that it feels more contrived than a reoccurring abused sofa gag involving Bug.

Reggie (Will Ferrell) is a carefree, sweet, oh-so-innocent Border Terrier who wants nothing more than to please his master, Doug (Will Forte). Kudos to Forte for creating perhaps one of the most despicable, irredeemable pet owners in cinematic history. His disregard for Reggie makes the Grinch’s treatment of Max look innocent. Doug’s main priorities are smoking weed, mooching off his mother, masturbating, trimming his pubes, and drinking beer (and not in that order), all while ignoring Reggie and treating him like an afterthought. From Reggie’s perspective—all narrated by Ferrell’s naive gullible persona—Doug has a different way of expressing his love. One of those ways is a game he plays with Reggie, where he throws a ball so far away, abandons Reggie, and drives away. But the persistent Reggie always finds his way home to bring back the ball. 

After accidentally destroying Doug’s favorite bong, he is driven three hours away from home. (That only begs the question of why Doug doesn’t drop Reggie off at a shelter, but we can’t ask questions like that.) Reggie is dropped in an inner-city alley and realizes he’s on his own amongst other stray dogs. Luckily, he crosses paths with Bug, a street-smart dog that has an affinity for peeing on objects, humping, and saying the F word. (Jamie Foxx comes off as grating and unfunny; every curse word seems crow-barred in simply to make the film far more edgy than the adorable face of its pup.) 

Reggie is introduced to two other dogs—Maggie (Isla Fisher), an Australian Shepherd neglected by her owner for a more Insta-looking puppy, and Hunter (Randall Park), an ex-police Great Dane that spends his day riddled with anxiety while wearing a giant medical cone over his head. Pug takes it upon himself to show Reggie the great benefits of being a stray: you can claim anything you want with your pee, scraps of food are plentiful, you can hump anything (especially gnomes), and you have a sense of independence. However, Reggie simply wants to make Doug happy but has a sad realization that all the time Doug spent ignoring, berating, and pushing off means no matter how hard Reggie will try, his cute, fluffy energy is all for naught.

This sparks an idea: Reggie intends to go back home and bite his genitals off. The rest of the gang love the idea, and so they embark on a journey to Doug’s place before he gets evicted. Onward the journey begins, as Reggie’s newfound friends traverse difficult terrain such as loud county fairs, a mushroom-riddled field, and a dog kennel with a random, subversive cameo appearance by Brett Gelman, to find Doug and bite off his appendage. 

Having grown up on talking animal movies sold to families as mass entertainment, there’s a devilish playfulness Strays painfully tries to dig into (no pun intended). However, the film is simply too distracted by being puerile and the fact that dogs are carrying out these acts. The juvenile humor can only go so far, in that it requires you to forgo any semblance of what you consider funny and simply enjoy the shenanigans of seeing cute dogs curse, poop, and hump their way in this journey of sparse comedy. 

It taps into what I imagine many dog owners find unique about dogs, but that can’t carry a film’s momentum, especially when the film does a slapdash effort at the word building. There’s a moment the gang passes alley cats, and Bug mouths a curse word in the subtitle, yet the cats never talk back to the dogs. Can cats not talk or have their own conversations in this world? If that’s the case, then why can an eagle communicate its frustrations through subtitles as it tries to fly off with Bug and Reggie? Do dogs only understand other animals through subtitles? It’s this kind of confusing world-building that makes the film come across as a perfunctory exercise in immature laziness that deflates a lot of the film’s attempts at broadening the scope outside of dogs.

The voice cast feels wasted. Only Fisher and Park seem to infuse their vocal performances with any spunk or charisma, especially as they both indicate they have feelings for each other and try their best to quell the sexual tensions with even more coarse attempts at humor. Ferrell and Foxx ham it to an annoying level that almost makes their voices work and extend the capabilities of the talking slips on these dogs. The narrative becomes aimless in construction, where they decide to throw in a random subplot involving a lost girl scout just as a way to reincorporate Maggie’s incredible sense of smell. 

The forced exacerbated vigor that reeks from Strays follows a long line of unremarkable raunchy comedies like Sausage Party (2016), The Happytime Murders (2018), where the incessant humor is solely rooted in something that doesn’t talk with curse words. They’re infantilizing and don’t offer anything more than manifesting childhood “what-ifs” into plodding dead zones of wasted potentials that never go beyond their initial premises. We always wished we could talk to our pets, but Strays proves we’re not missing much.

Review Courtesy of Amritpal Rai

Feature Image via Universal Pictures