Avidavr: Media Reviews

Tag: movie review

  • Big Swings, Big Misses #1: Bill Murray and Passion Play (2010)

    The first film in my new series about the lowest rated movie by actors I love.

    Great actors make bad movies. Sometimes they make choices that result in merely disappointing films. Sometimes they make movies that hurt their careers for no real reason at all. And sometimes they make movies so strange, so fundamentally misguided, that you almost have to admire whatever thought process led them to say, “Yes, this is a good idea. Let’s make this.”

    That is the idea behind Big Swings, Big Misses, a series where I pick an actor I love and watch the lowest-rated movie on Metacritic that they were involved with. A Metacritic score below 30 is, in my mind, always unreleasable. Yet these movies get released anyway. It is the cinematic equivalent of accidentally replying-all to the entire company. You do not want one of these on your résumé.

    For Bill Murray, that movie is Passion Play (2010), a film that currently sits at the bottom of his Metacritic page with a score of 21 out of 100. It is also the lowest-rated movie on Metacritic for Megan Fox. Mickey Rourke has somehow managed to make two movies rated even lower than this. We may get to those movies at some point.

    Mickey Rourke plays Nate Poole, a washed-up trumpet player whose life is going to get worse very soon. He has to steal money from his boss’s poker game just to get paid for work he has already done. Shortly after that, he is kidnapped by criminals and taken into the desert to be executed. Just before he is killed, his would-be executioner is killed by a group of Native Americans dressed like baseball players. Or perhaps they are baseball players dressed like Native Americans. The movie never really clarifies. I am not entirely certain who they are or why they are there. The movie is not especially interested in answering those questions. Nate survives, walks through the desert, and eventually stumbles into the nearest town.

    This town contains a carnival. More specifically, it contains Megan Fox, who plays Lily, a carnival attraction with actual angel wings. Not fake wings. Not a costume. Real, feathered, fully functional angel wings growing out of her back. Nate pays admission to see her, becomes fascinated by her almost immediately, follows her back to her trailer, and somehow convinces her to let him in for a drink. The movie treats this as the beginning of a tragic romance. I spent much of the first act trying to determine whether the movie wanted me to take the angel wings literally, metaphorically, or both. The answer appears to be yes.

    Lily’s life is controlled by Sam, the carnival owner, who reacts to Nate’s presence by threatening him. This is the second time in the movie that Nate finds himself fearing for his life, and we can only roll our eyes at how quickly and conveniently these plot developments arrive. Lily eventually crashes a truck into Sam’s trailer, rescues Nate, and drives away with him. The two spend time together and develop a relationship, although “develop” may be too strong a word. It is a love affair of plot convenience rather than emotional conviction. The movie is constantly reaching for a dreamy, melancholy atmosphere, but it often feels as if entire scenes are missing between the scenes that actually made it into the final cut.

    Is Passion Play a parable about angels? You can tell the screenwriter watched Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire, although I am less certain that he understood it. What exactly is Lily, and why does everyone become so entranced by her almost immediately? Nate sees her and falls in love. Happy sees her and becomes obsessed. Wealthy patrons will eventually pay money just to stand around looking at her. Megan Fox spends much of the movie speaking softly and staring into the distance, yet she somehow becomes the gravitational center of the story. The screenplay treats her appeal as self-evident.

    Meanwhile, Bill Murray enters the movie as Happy Shannon, a gangster with a personal grudge against Nate. It turns out Nate once slept with Happy’s wife. Happy responded by having his wife killed, which is a comically disproportionate reaction. Nate attempts to save himself by telling Happy about Lily and her wings. This is where the movie takes a turn from strange to fascinatingly strange. Our hero falls deeply in love with a stranger and then almost immediately betrays her. Happy sees Lily, becomes captivated by her, and decides that her wings can make him rich. The exact mechanics of this business plan remain unclear throughout the movie, but everyone involved treats it as a completely reasonable proposition.

    This brings me to one of my favorite scenes in the film. Happy eventually sets Lily up in a theater and begins charging wealthy customers for the privilege of seeing her. The movie builds this up as if we are about to witness some extraordinary spectacle. What is the act? Does she fly? Does she sing? Does she perform miracles? The answer is no. Lily stands on a stage in a small plexiglass box. That is the act. She stands there displaying her wings while wealthy patrons watch. Bill Murray sits in the balcony observing the proceedings like a man who has finally discovered the perfect business model.

    I spent the entire scene trying to understand the economics of this operation. Are people buying repeat tickets? Is there a second act? Does anyone ask questions? How many times can a person pay to see Megan Fox stand motionless in a box before they begin demanding additional value for their entertainment dollar? These are the sorts of questions that occupied my mind while the movie was trying very hard to be profound.

    The movie is filled with moments like this. It wants desperately to be a tragic fantasy romance, but it keeps getting distracted by ideas it never fully develops. My favorite example comes when Nate attempts to find work. A character who I believe is connected to his former employer tells him:

    “You can’t bus tables. You can’t clean toilets. You can’t even buy a drink in here. Not here, or anyplace else.”

    How omniscient.

    This line is intended to be devastating. Instead, it raises a number of practical questions. Who is this man? What authority does he possess? Is he merely a bar manager, or does he somehow control employment opportunities throughout North America? The screenplay needs Nate to hit rock bottom, so it simply has a minor character announce that rock bottom has arrived. The effect is unintentionally hilarious. It is the kind of line that sounds dramatic while you are writing it at two in the morning and considerably less dramatic once another human being says it out loud.

    If Bill Murray had said this line, I might have taken it seriously. If the movie had established some kind of criminal blacklist, I might have accepted it. Instead, it comes from a character we barely know, and he delivers it with the confidence of a man who has personally surveyed every restaurant, bar, and janitorial department in the Western Hemisphere.

    The frustrating thing about Passion Play is that there is a better movie hiding somewhere inside it. The premise alone is bizarre enough to justify its existence. A washed-up jazz musician falls in love with an angel while a gangster attempts to turn her into a profitable attraction. That is not the plot of a movie assembled by market research. Someone genuinely believed in this idea. Someone thought this could be a great film.

    I cannot justify actually hating this movie.

    The screenplay is underwritten. Entire character motivations seem to disappear between scenes. Characters fall in love because the screenplay says they should be in love. Characters betray one another because the next scene requires a betrayal. The score often sounds like it was recorded in a spare bedroom after a weekend spent listening to Pearl Jam albums. Yet the movie never feels generic.

    I was rarely surprised by individual plot developments, but I never found the movie predictable. There is a difference. Most bad movies fail in familiar ways. They are bland, corporate, cynical, or lazy. Passion Play fails in its own unique way. It is reaching for something melancholy and mythic and romantic. It wants to be a noir fairy tale. It wants to be tragic. It wants to be profound. It simply has no idea how to get there.

    Should Bill Murray be embarrassed that this is the lowest-rated movie on his Metacritic page? Probably not. Actors who spend their careers taking chances inevitably end up with a few disasters. The same instincts that lead someone to appear in Lost in Translation or Rushmore can occasionally lead them somewhere much stranger.


    I suspect Murray did Passion Play for the same reason many odd movies get made in the first place: somebody he liked pitched him an idea he couldn’t quite say no to. Mitch Glazer wrote Scrooged, but this feels like his Gigli—a passion project that never figured out how to become a movie. Still, I can imagine Glazer at a Denny’s at one in the morning, talking excitedly about a washed-up trumpet player, an angel with real wings, and a gangster who wants to put her on display. Eventually, keeping the conversation going feels easier than ending it. “You know what?” Bill Murray says. “I’d act in this. Want another shot of whiskey in your coffee?”

    Rating: 2.5/10

  • Is This Thing On? (Bradley Cooper, 2025)

    Or: Dis We Finish the Script?

    I thought this movie was great when I logged it last night. Now I’m conflicted. I liked it while I was watching it, but the more I tried to write about it, the less I could justify its existence. It kind of fizzled away after the credits.

    Four men, all credited on the script, came together to write a female character meant to feel authentic and relatable. I might have loved the movie if Laura Dern had been given a chance to rewrite some of her dialogue, because as it stands, the perspective feels weirdly aloof. Too much of it lands in “women be crazy, am I right?” territory. Dern and Will Arnett both do strong work, but she is working against material that keeps treating her as an idea instead of a person.

    The poster/photo choice bothered me too. Having Arnett put up a picture of Dern that does not show her face may work narratively on one level, but it feels like a cheap solution for a mainstream Hollywood movie. It would have been more interesting, and more confounding for him, if the photo looked like another actress and Dern could simply say, “That doesn’t even look like me.”

    The bigger issue is that the main plot feels like a beat-for-beat remake of Ghostlight. That movie was hammy and overloaded with coincidences, but it had a stronger reason to exist. It said something true about losing a child, even when the movie itself did not always feel true. Is This Thing On? has truthful pieces, but not enough connective tissue.

    Every movie gets one coincidence, but Dern showing up at the exact comedy club where Arnett is performing is painfully contrived. Had it been the fifth date night between her and Peyton Manning’s character — a badly miscast role, by the way — I could have accepted it. As written, I had to invoke the “one coincidence” rule and move on, even though it made no sense.

    There are other shortcuts that feel like low-budget writing decisions. Arnett’s sexual conquest is written with almost no texture: foreplay as “I think we should have sex. We are going to have sex,” followed by her leaving for work and telling him not to let the cat out. That is not a character; that is a function. Likewise, we are told another woman will do a magic show for his kids, which sounds like a fun chance to give a supporting character a memorable moment, and then we never see it. It is setup with no payoff — not even a five-second shot.

    The frustrating thing is that there is a great idea for a script here, and the central storyline has truth in it. In some ways, the direction could not be better. I love the long takes, the stand-up routines are strong, and Arnett and Dern are surprisingly good with the material they have. But the movie also feels strangely amateur from a production and writing standpoint. This may be one of the rare cases where the dreaded Hollywood producer note would have helped: “Is there enough here to put in a trailer?” I usually hate movies built around that question, but maybe this one needed it. It needed a clearer reason to exist.

  • Day3: Bad Taste (Peter Jackson, 1987) review

    A-Z “Hidden Gems” Film-a-thon Day 2

    “One day, when you are famous and everyone knows your name, people will see this and laugh at you.”

    “Good. I hope they do. I am quite happy with how it turned out.”

    That was an exchange I once had with my sister about one of my own early creative projects, the album Mad Cow Disease by my high school musical group, The Cadets of Temperance. My college-era zombie movie, Oh, No! Zombies!!!, inspired similar reactions from older relatives who seemed less charmed by my artistic instincts than I was. Other people involved had supportive families. Mine sometimes looked at what I was making with the expression of people being asked to admire a live electrical fire.

    So I feel a certain kinship with Peter Jackson’s Bad Taste.

    Watching it, I kept imagining Jackson showing this thing to his family at age twenty-four while they tried to process what exactly they were seeing. “What is this?” “Why do the aliens have human disguises that still leave their giant butt cheeks exposed?” “Why does the man with the head wound keep putting his brain back into his skull and carrying on?”

    To my disappointment, Jackson never seems to have offered a great canonical explanation for the aliens’ protruding rear ends. But with a title like Bad Taste, perhaps he felt no obligation to. If anyone questioned the exposed buttocks, he could always point to the marquee and say: I warned you.

    The plot, such as it is, concerns a group of men battling grotesque aliens in rural New Zealand. The creatures look a bit like something Jim Henson might have designed on weekend during a high degree fever. One character, Derek, suffers a catastrophic head wound early on and spends much of the film scooping fallen brain matter off the ground and stuffing it back into his skull. At one point, he even seems willing to supplement his own supply with alien brain. This is not a movie in which medical distinctions matter.

    What struck me most was not the story, which barely qualifies as one, but the brute fact of the movie’s existence. I watched it on Plex without subtitles, which did it no favors. The accents are thick, the sound often resembles dialogue captured inside a coffee can, and the image has that faded, fragile look common to low-budget productions. And yet the camera, while shaky, is never hopelessly amateurish. The movie may not be polished, but it is recognizably a movie. That already puts it ahead of many ambitious homemade projects.

    Bad Taste is less a world than a continuity exercise. Nothing in it feels fleshed out enough to support a larger mythology, and Jackson does not seem especially interested in coherence for its own sake. What he is interested in is getting the shot, finishing the effect, solving the problem in front of him. That is the real subject of the film.

    Jackson plays Derek, the memorably concussed hero, but he also seems to play half the surrounding population. So many characters look suspiciously like Peter Jackson with slight variations in beard, wig, or voice that the film begins to feel like one man arguing with himself across New Zealand. From a strict continuity standpoint, it is not impressive. I noticed missing details, shifting visual elements, and the usual evidence of a production held together with stubborn improvisation. But Jackson was operating under absurd constraints, including the small matter of having to act in multiple roles while also making the movie.

    And that is why Bad Taste matters.

    Not because it is a great film on its own terms. It is not. The writing is thin, the world-building is nonexistent, and much of the humor depends on the audience finding sheer excess funny. But the movie proves that Jackson had the one quality no school can really teach: full commitment. He shot the thing over four years, beginning with a self-financed budget of 25,000 New Zealand dollars before receiving further support from the New Zealand Film Commission to complete it. He had no film-school polish because he had never gone to film school at all. He left school young (age 16), taught himself by doing, and turned this movie into his education.

    In that sense, Bad Taste was his film school. Cheaper, too. The only thing he really missed were the writing classes.

    I made Oh, No! Zombies!!! the summer before my senior year of college and used its music for my final project. My presentation got honors largely because the professors laughed constantly while I explained how the movie had been made and how all the pieces fit together. I had been inspired by Ed Wood and by the worst zombie films I could find. What inspired Jackson here is harder to pin down. Bad Taste does not feel fully enough formed to be parody, and it is too odd to read as straightforward homage. It feels instead like a prototype for the grotesque brilliance he would later achieve in Dead Alive/Braindead: the early, unstable version of a sensibility not yet fully invented.

    I tried to watch Bad Taste when I was a junior in college and gave up. At that age, time felt too valuable to spend on something this ragged. I should have stuck with it. Watching it now is a little like seeing an early bicycle built by the Wright Brothers and asking why it does not fly. Of course it does not fly—that was never the point. The point is that it moves at all, that someone figured out how to make it work, and that they carried it across the finish line. Bad Taste is that kind of movie: less impressive for what it achieves on screen than for the fact that it exists, undeniable ragged—but overall complete.. Most movies, even now, never get that far.

    4/10

  • Day 12: Cube (1997)

    Goal: Find a movie I never heard of until it started showing up on streaming trends.

    —

    What I know about it:

    To me, this movie is an oddity. It’s like one of those titles that shows up on How Did This Get Made? alongside Death Spa or Chopping Mall—except this one actually has an overall good reputation. If it’s decent, why have I never heard a single respected critic mention it? Meanwhile, eXistenZ and Event Horizon weren’t exactly hits, yet people bring them up constantly on YouTube.

    The plot sounds intriguing enough: a group trapped in a mechanical maze that might be some layer of Hell. They move up, down, sideways—each new room maybe leading to freedom. I pictured Hellraiser by way of Saw, two movies franchises with famously devoted fans. So why doesn’t Cube ever come up in the same breath?

    I couldn’t find a proper trailer. I showed a clip to Josh on YouTube, and he wasn’t impressed. Maybe that’s a good sign. The movie doesn’t seem to sell itself, so maybe that is why no one has heard of it. He tends to like things that announce themselves loudly (Heretic, for example). Cube doesn’t seem to do that. Maybe the people who love it found it quietly—and showed it to their friends.

    I first heard of Cube in 2006, when it was the No. 1 most-borrowed DVD from Netflix in Carmel, Indiana. One month, it sat at the top of the local trends list like a mystery no one could explain. I’ve seen it pop up on other streaming charts since—but I’ve never once heard anyone talk about it. Ever.

    —

    After the movie:

    This was basically Canadian Escape Room: The Movie. Which is kind of impressive, considering it came out in 1997—long before “escape rooms” were a thing. I first heard of a real-life escape room in 2014, when they started popping up all over the West Coast. In Indianapolis, a place opened called The Escape Room. A year later, another one opened called Escape the Room. They weren’t connected, but I beat both. I was good, kinda—successfully completed both, where the success rate for each one was about 40%. Usually, I wasted time on red herrings, but I’d crack the last puzzle with seconds left.

    Cube didn’t invent the escape-room concept, but it definitely saw the appeal coming. Its roots are in point-and-click adventure games and Dungeons & Dragons modules. Sierra made some of the first “escape room”–style text adventures like Mystery House, where you typed in commands to make your way through puzzles. The version of this idea I played was Maniac Mansion — a Lucasfilm Games classic that added comic relief and actual personality. Every room in point-and-click adventure games is an escape room, and only the elite few wanted to think enough to make their way through those. The Secret of Monkey Island and Sam & Max Hit the Road are still two of the best games ever made.

    And before all that, there was Dungeons & Dragons. The legendary module Tomb of Horrors (Gary Gygax, 1975) was built entirely around the idea of a cruel puzzle dungeon. Players swapped horror stories about total party kills. The struggle was real.

    When I was a kid, that whole genre fascinated me. My favorite was Jim Henson’s Labyrinth, but I also loved Scooby-Doo Meets the Boo Brothers (1987)—a movie where Shaggy inherits a haunted mansion and has to solve puzzles to find a hidden fortune. Looking back, that was basically The Da Vinci Code for children.

    The problem is, puzzle-solving doesn’t translate well to film. Watching someone instantly solve something you never understood isn’t satisfying. It works in a game, or maybe a serialized show—like Batman cliffhangers: How will they get out of the conveyor belt trap this time? Stay tuned next week. Same Bat-time, same Bat-channel.

    But Cube doesn’t build a world to make those puzzles matter. There’s almost no setup or lore—just math equations and quick deductions. The puzzles function as MacGuffins, filler between moments of panic. You can’t play along. You just wait to see who dies next.

    Still, it’s fun. The writing’s solid, and most of the acting works. The “villain” type might be the worst performer here—but that’s part of the fun. (Play “Spot the Worst Actor” at home and see if you agree.)

    The direction feels dated, full of leftover ’90s TV transitions. Even when there is gore, the whole thing looks like an episode of Goosebumps or early Buffy the Vampire Slayer—but cheaper.

    The ending, though, is a letdown. It just… stops. No emotional payoff, no moral, no world-building to make sense of anything. It’s one of those “Wouldn’t it be messed up if…?” movies that mistakes mystery for meaning. I think the implication is aliens—but it could be anything, and the movie doesn’t seem sure either.

    I liked Cube. I could almost recommend it. It deserves credit for being nothing like anything else from its decade, but it’s the kind of film that practically begs for a remake.

    5.5 / 10

  • Day 7: Heretic (2024)

    Goal: Find the most notable current sleeper horror hit.

    —

    What I know about it:

    Next to nothing. It’s got a 90% on Rotten Tomatoes and a 71 on Metacritic. For this week’s theme, I wanted a movie that feels big but that I somehow know literally nothing about.

    It has Hugh Grant and it seems to be about Mormons. He’s some kind of weird loner with a torture house. It seems like the movie everyone will still be talking about in five years. Just a hunch. Let’s see if I’m right.

    —

    After the movie:

    Do you remember when Bend It Like Beckham came out, and at first you wondered how they got Kate Winslet to seem 18 years old? Then you realized it wasn’t Kate Winslet but her strange, skinny doppelgänger named Keira Knightley? She ended up going pretty far, mostly because a lot of screenwriters had been writing parts for Kate Winslet five years earlier — and Winslet would’ve turned them down anyway. Keira Knightley turned out to be great. But she was no Kate Winslet.

    Sophie Thatcher is the new Keira Knightley. She’s not getting cast in parts written for Kate Winslet — she looks and sounds exactly like Emma Stone. I’d wager Sophie Thatcher is actually a more natural actress. She’s great in Heretic, and even better in 2025’s sleeper hit Companion, which I actually recommend even more for this week’s theme: “the sleeper horror hit.”

    Sophie Thatcher feels so much like Emma Stone that there’s a bit of a “new Coke” imitation effect going on. In Companion, that worked perfectly because she was supposed to feel like an imitation of the real thing. But in Heretic, there’s a little whiplash when she starts talking. How did this extremely smart, modern girl get cast as a Mormon missionary?

    If this movie had been made twelve years ago, Emma Stone would’ve been perfect. She had that “smart but innocent” quality — the thing that peaked with Poor Things. Sophie feels like Emma’s 12-years-younger little sister who also decided to act. Seeing this modern, post-ironic type trying to convert unsuspecting Christians to this quirky, folksy little underdog religion… I just wanted to say, “Shouldn’t you be in Brooklyn? Go home.”

    I’m stalling. What was the movie and what did I think of it? It was small and imteresting. Honestly, it feels like it could’ve been a play — maybe one converted to film at the last second. This is a horror movie tailor-made to play at sorority movie nights at Brigham Young University. Modern girls who freely explore the world, who’ve seen South Park and homemade internet porn, yet firmly believe in their mission: to tell the world about their faith. They’re believable. Exactly as good as young people who’ve never had a reason to question what they believe.

    On the other side of that coin is Hugh Grant as Mr. Reed, the titular “heretic” — every Mormon missionary’s worst nightmare. The poster has him smiling, staring at a game board with the two sisters as miniature chess pieces. Mr. Reed plays with them like a cat tossing a mouse, keeping himself amused before the kill. “You still believe that my wife is in the other room baking blueberry pie, despite all the evidence to the contrary.”

    Heretic has a handful of great ideas, and kind of a boatload of padding. Case in point: in addition to religion, Mr. Reed is obsessed with copyright disputes. He brings up two examples — Monopoly and “Creep” by Radiohead — as evidence that remakes and copies are more successful than originals.

    He’s got a point with Monopoly. I’m a board game hobbyist, and even I’d never heard of The Landlord’s Game, the 1904 prototype Monopoly ripped off almost entirely. Looking it up online made me respect it even more. One of its “Chance Cube” outcomes said, “5: Caught robbing a hen-roost: Go to jail. 10: Caught robbing the public. Take $200 from the board. The players will now call you Senator.” You can’t copyright board-game mechanics — or religious texts, for that matter. Mr. Reed makes that point too: religions are all just cover versions of each other.

    Where he loses me is with his deep affection for The Hollies’ “The Air That I Breathe.” Yes, the guitar progression is the same as “Creep,” and Thom Yorke’s phrasing is similar. But “The Air That I Breathe” has no hook. It’s a song no one under 70 cares about. The Hollies were basically the Thomas Edison of 1970s pop — taking half-forgotten ideas and dressing them up without subtlety. I’d have been way more impressed if Mr. Reed compared Joseph Smith to The Hollies directly, and left Radiohead out of it.

    Screenwriter, I see what you’re doing. But no one likes that song.

    But that last shot? Very good — it should be studied. It’s nice when little moments call back and actually have purpose. There’s a famous movie that ends with a man believing he survived a horror, cutting into a birthday cake… and we realize he’s still trapped, imagining a happy ending. Heretic’s ending is like that — but more artful. It’s not trying to scare you with a hand bursting from the ground next to a gravestone. It’s believable — truthful about what happens to the mind when coping with an actual human tragedy. A perfect little movie moment.

    Still, this is a decent movie. It feels like a filmed play — one that’s not really worth seeking out unless you’re curious. It doesn’t have much going for it other than novelty and a few twists, almost all in the first 40 minutes.

    If you see it, maybe you’ll agree.

    (That’s not a spoiler.)

    6.5/10

  • We Don’t Deserve Dogs (2020)

    Mellon collies and the infinite sadness.

    This is a collection of interviews and stories from dog owners and admirers about the dogs in their communities or the pets that have changed their lives. The mood of the film aligns with its title — this is all very, very sad. Sad stories, sad people, and sad circumstances that brought dogs into their lives.

    The music is relentlessly somber, a constant collage of string instruments playing sustained whole notes, reminiscent of Philip Glass composing his version of Adagio for Strings by Samuel Barber. Interestingly, the actual composer is a former child actor, one of the Little Rascals from the 1990s movie — an odd detail.

    About 80% of the film is not in English. It’s a beautifully filmed, albeit somewhat amateur, travelogue that captures glimpses of how dogs are perceived in various cultures. Some of the countries featured include Chile, Peru, Uganda, Pakistan, Romania, Vietnam, and Scotland. I had to look this up, as the segments aren’t separated by headings or on-screen text.

    The film might have been aiming for the tone of Kedi, the 2016 documentary about Istanbul’s street cats. In that film, we see how cats bring meaning to people’s lives, often serving as community mascots. They’re respected and cared for, but no one person takes sole responsibility for them.

    The opening story, set in Santiago, Chile, echoes this concept. It features a dog named Dr. Coffee who lives a dual life. Everyone in the neighborhood knows him and will often ask, “Have you seen Coffee today?” He moves freely, vanishing and reappearing days later. Eventually, one resident learns that the hospital nearby knows him by a different name — he has a room there and stays for days at a time. Coffee isn’t like a typical dog; he doesn’t crave pets and affection. His version of companionship is simply sitting quietly with kind people.

    In Uganda, survivors of violent trauma are given dogs as a form of emotional support. One woman names her dog PTSD to reflect the emotional weight she’s working through. The belief is that a dog provides unconditional love, free from hate or judgment. The group dog-training sessions, where dozens of new dog owners learn how to care for their companions, are striking in their simplicity and warmth.

    In Pakistan, a self-described tomboy finds a dog on the street with a paralyzed leg, covered in maggots, and left to die. Despite many people telling her to give the dog away once he recovered, she refused. Some people in Pakistan believe that having a dog in the house will prevent God from accepting you into heaven. She rejects that belief, instead seeing the dog’s presence in her life as part of God’s plan. Her story is one of quiet defiance and compassion.

    Not all the stories are tragic. In Chile, a therapy dog named Patron brings joy to residents of a retirement home. During an exercise session, Patron is told to “find the yellow ball,” which he does effortlessly. The residents marvel at his ability to distinguish colors. One participant remarks, “If a dog comes up and hugs you, then it is a hugging dog, and you can hug it.” This gentle wisdom encapsulates the joy dogs bring — they accept us for who we are.

    However, the film doesn’t shy away from difficult realities. In Vietnam, the dog meat trade is addressed. A restaurant owner recounts how his father introduced him to the practice as a child. While he acknowledges that dog meat consumption has declined, he continues to serve it as long as there is demand. This segment is sobering, forcing viewers to confront how cultural norms shape our perceptions of animals. It made me wonder about the conditions of dog meat farms and, by extension, the treatment of all farm animals. Should I view them all as dogs? It’s a thought that lingered with me.

    While the film’s tone leans toward the morose, it remains gentle in its approach. Dog lovers will appreciate the celebration of the bond between humans and animals, as long as they’re prepared for the emotional weight of the stories. Ultimately, We Don’t Deserve Dogs serves as a poignant reminder of the kindness and joy that dogs bring to our lives.

    7.5/10