Strays

Doggie tropes abound like a litter of frisky Dalmatian puppies in the look-who’s-cursing canine comedy Strays. It’s a leg-humping, butt-sniffing, balls-licking, tree-pissing, turd-pooping, R-rated raunchfest with more bark than bite. Less salacious chestnuts, like the hatred of mailmen and fear of fireworks, also feature prominently here. But in a nice twist, Strays turns the bromide of man’s best friend on its ear. This is the anti-Marley & Me. It reserves its sentimentality for its naughty-but-nice bowwow protagonists and growls with righteous hostility at a human abuser named Doug, played to scumbag perfection by Forte in dire need of a shave and a bath.

Doug – the movie’s only nonliteral son of a bitch – is a PETA nightmare of a man. In the film’s opening sequence, he mistreats sweet border terrier Reggie (Ferrell) so badly you instantly despise him. But even when coldhearted Doug abandons naive Reggie in a mean-spirited game of fetch in a city miles and miles away from home, the dumped dog refuses to acknowledge the toxicity of their relationship despite the protests of his new street buddy, an MF-bombing Boston terrier named (natch) Bug (Foxx). (It’s a sadly familiar dynamic appropriated from cases of human domestic violence and abuse.) The swaggering Bug exposes his inexperienced PFF (just imagine what the “P” stands for) to the joys of life off the leash, though it’s evident a wounded heart beats beneath that little tough-guy exterior. Joined by two other homeless dogs, a scent-sational Australian shepherd named Maggie (Fisher) and an emotionally needy therapy Great Dane called Hunter (Park, sublimely deadpan as always), the foursome treks an incredible journey to pay Doug a visit so that a freshly enlightened Reggie can even the score with his ex-owner.

The movie struggles to find the right kind of humor for its adult demographic, given that a talking dog flick is a genre usually targeted at kids somewhere in PG territory. The sex gags often try too hard (though the dry humping never gets old), and the scatological stuff feels juvenile most of the time. An 8-year-old might go gaga over a scene showing several variations of steaming piles of dogshit, but his elders are just as likely to say, “Yuck.” And why does Dennis Quaid appear with a pair of binoculars in a bizarro cameo as himself? There’s an inside joke in there somewhere.

But there are also some very funny bits here, including a scene involving an invisible fence and a recurring gag as Bug struts slo-mo down the street and eyeballs passersby. As for Reggie’s epic payback, hilariously orchestrated to the tune of Miley Cyrus belting “Wrecking Ball,” let’s just say there hasn’t been a more satisfying comeuppance by an avenging canine’s canines since Sansa Stark sicced the hounds on Lord Ramsay Bolton. You’ll be laughing so hard you may forget to breathe.