Marmaduke (2010)

A Great Dane relocates from Kansas to Orange County, and the culture shock is confined entirely to canine social strata. Marmaduke arrives in 2010 with a comic-strip pedigree, an ensemble of talking animals, and a plot assembled from the standard parts: a snobbish clique of purebreds, a surfing contest staged for a Petco pitch, a dream date hijacked from the wrong girl, a runaway third act, and a closing musical number. The film has no interest in saying anything about the world. It has interest in a dog passing gas in bed and winking at the camera. That is the entire thesis, and it is delivered without apology.

On the matter of social consciousness, the ledger is nearly blank. The voice cast includes minority performers, but they are deployed as broad comic accents and nothing more, and the film never pauses to comment on their presence. The pedigrees-versus-mutts hierarchy at the park reads as a generic clique plot, the sort of lunchroom politics that predates any modern vocabulary for it. There is no romantic architecture beyond a love triangle resolved by convenience, no identity inquiry, no environmental grievance, no critique of the corporate machinery that literally drives the story. Bark Organics and Petco are comic furniture. The film regards them the way it regards everything else, as something to knock over.

What remains is a faint residue of moral instruction. Marmaduke's closing address to the park, in which he proposes that differences should not matter and that all dogs deserve equal access to the grass, is the sort of sentiment that family films have been issuing since the medium learned to talk. It is warm, it is brief, and it is entirely untethered from anything the preceding ninety minutes bothered to establish. A critic can only log it and move on. The dog surfs, the dog apologizes, the dog wins. Somewhere a marketing director keeps his job.