Turner & Hooch (1989)

Turner & Hooch arrives from 1989, a year in which a studio could pay a million dollars for a screenplay about a tidy detective and a slobbering Dogue de Bordeaux and consider the investment sound. The central relationship is between a man and a dog, and the film never proposes that it is about anything larger. There is no thesis here. There is a murder, a money-laundering scheme hidden inside blocks of ice, and a great deal of drool. The machinery of social instruction, so familiar to the modern viewer, is entirely absent from the proceedings.

The supporting presence of Reginald VelJohnson as a fellow detective warrants a mention, dropped into the cast without a syllable of comment. Mare Winningham's Emily runs a veterinary practice and speaks with professional authority, which is simply how the role was written. The villain, a seafood magnate named Boyett, is a rich man doing crimes, a convention older than cinema and no more an argument about capital than a game of Monopoly. Scott Turner's fastidious habits exist to be humiliated by a large animal, not to be diagnosed. The film holds no interest in the interior life of its protagonist beyond the comedic potential of a ruined couch.

What remains is a lightweight entertainment that never turns to the audience to explain its meaning. No character delivers a speech about the way things ought to be. The environment goes unmentioned. History is not revised. The resolution involves a wedding, a pregnancy, and a puppy that looks exactly like the dead one. This is a film content to be about a man and a dog, and within that modest ambition it succeeds. The sommelier finds nothing to swirl.