Dog Man
Year: 2025
Rating: PG
Length: 89 minutes / 1.48 hours
While I’m no stranger to movies based on kids’ media, Dog Man (2025) was definitely not designed with adults in mind. Sure, there were a few jokes here and there that the adults would chuckle at, but the mind-numbing, blistering pace at which things happened and changed in this movie was honestly surprising. I get that kids’ attention spans are shrinking at an alarming rate, but when it’s up there flashing on the big screen, it’s hard not to notice. At the very least, I think my kids had fun, even if they were mostly indifferent about it.
Despite what the intro to this review makes it sound like, I appreciated the Dog Man movie sticking to the aesthetic from the books. It still had that “high definition” veneer on everything, but the feel was very hand-drawn (similar to how The Peanuts Movie (2015) did it). And by sticking to somewhat lesser-known voice actors, I was actually immersed in the characters without thinking to myself, “Hey, that’s so-and-so.” Ultimately, on the technical level, Dog Man is a well-done film that continues to show how CGI doesn’t need to be realistic to “upgrade” the original source material.
Perhaps I was too tired when I watched Dog Man, but even I had trouble keeping up with what was happening. Since I don’t have any experience with the source material, I don’t know if this is just part of how Dog Man is or if the producers and executives focused grouped it down to this rapid-fire sequence of loosely connected set pieces. Sure, some of the running gags are funny, but when one of the characters is literally named “80-HD,” I get the sense that the whole movie is supposed to embody the concept of ADHD.
An assault on low attention spans that at least looks pretty good, I give Dog Man 3.0 stars out of 5.
