Snow Dogs (2002)

Snow Dogs arrives from 2002, a Disney family comedy in which a Miami dentist named Ted Brooks inherits seven Siberian huskies, a Border Collie, and a cabin in the Alaskan backwoods, then spends ninety-nine minutes being cold. Brian Levant directs with the steady hand of a man who knows what a dog looks like. Cuba Gooding Jr. performs the fish-out-of-water material at a volume the material does not require. Michael Bolton appears in a dream sequence to remind our hero that he still has soul. The film is not without charm for a child. It is entirely without ideology, which is its own kind of distinction in this line of work.

The casting is the one place where the film shows any forward motion. Gooding Jr. headlines, and around him the production assembles Nichelle Nichols as his adoptive mother, Sisqo as his cousin and dental partner, Graham Greene as Peter Yellowbear, and Christopher Judge as his adoptive father. For a 2002 studio comedy aimed at families, that is a more varied ensemble than the era's norms required. The film never comments on any of it. Nobody explains what the audience is seeing. The presence is simply there, which is either admirable restraint or an absence of ambition, depending on the temperament of the viewer.

Elsewhere the ledger comes up empty, and the emptiness is thorough. Barb owns a bar, teaches Ted to drive a sled, and ends the picture pregnant and answering his phone. The Alaskan wilderness functions as weather and as obstacles, never as a cause. The Hot Smile branding is a running gag about a dentist's vanity, not an indictment of commerce. Demon's foul disposition turns out to be a rotten tooth, which this film, being a film about a dentist, resolves with extraction. There is no lecture. There is no sermon. There is a dog, and then there are more dogs.