Firehouse Dog

As we exited the theatre, my 5-year-old son turned to me and proclaimed Firehouse Dog the greatest movie ever. He said it had a bad guy and lots of rescues, and it was sort of scary but he wasn’t scared because he’s 5 now. Once the dog rescued a firefighter (Claudette Mink) by digging her out of a cave-in with his paws! That dog was a really great dog, he said. And there was this other part where dogs ran around in a contest, racing through tunnels and jumping through fire, he said, ando a funny joke where one of the firefighters went down the pole too fast and landed on the other firefighter. I agreed that the movie had all these things, but I didn’t like the other parts as much, like the setup, about a Hollywood pooch (animal actors Arwen, Frodo, Rohan, and Stryder) who gets lost during a stunt and ends up a stray outside a downtown firehouse captained by a single dad (Greenwood) with a stubborn school-skipping son (Hutcherson, of Bridge to Terabithia). I liked the parts in which the boy and the dog became friends and the boy solved a mystery; I thought the kid was good, and the dad (who used to make movies with this Canadian guy Atom Egoyan) was actually pretty awesome. But I didn’t like how the dog wore a cheesy bouffant hairpiece and silk robes and did computer-animated stunts and rode a skateboard and farted a lot. All these things were supposed to be funny, but I’d seen it all before in movies about funny animals – and besides, who could beat surfing penguins at that anthropomorphic game? I also questioned the filmmakers’ taste at times. (Item: When Rexx returns to the film set, his handlers reward him with three pastel-tinted lady poodles.) Perhaps the lesson to be learned is that just because we can use computer technology to give dogs goofy faces, that doesn’t mean we should.