Josh Greenbaum’s Strays is the kind of movie that people love to hate on and occasionally turn out to see in droves. This is due to two factors, and the first is that it’s an unabashedly raunchy comedy, with enough dick, shit, piss, and drug jokes stuffed within the first five minutes to pop the monocle off of any sufficiently stuffed shirt’s cheekbone. See, these are stupid movies, after all. At least when you’re dressing up semi-Buddhist Chick Tracts as tear-jerker dramas about a dog being forced to reincarnate until it meets the one person it was separated from who needed him the most, you have the pretension of drama or the saving grace of camp. Here, if it’s not funny, you’re fucked, and there’s plenty enough that folks might find just straight-up nauseating instead of humorous. Folks bemoan the disappearance of the R-rated comedy from theaters for good reason, but part of it has to do with how culture overdosed on movies like this back in the ’90s and ’00s, leaving a nice little niche for family-friendly flippant blockbusters to swoop in. Marvel’s an all-in-one genre package for a lot of people, and with easily-accessible porn putting the sex comedy out to pasture and the meme game getting edgy as fuck, even on TikTok, it’s genuinely pretty difficult to make something that audiences will respond to, especially when trapped in a typical narrative structure.
The second is that Strays is a dog-centric adventure movie, like Homeward Bound or Milo and Otis (minus the animal cruelty), which is also a hard fucking genre to mine unless you’re making a movie about struggling with a dog’s death or some shit because the ephemeral nature of a dog’s life is all that we can seem to appreciate about them. In a human-centric world, dogs are simply a microcosm for the human experience. They are the things we wish we could be – kind, loving, freely accepting of tummy rubs – with their lifespans speed-ran fast enough for us to appreciate their mortality, unlike the folks around us or the planet itself. To be fair, and I say this from recent experience that grief isn’t anything to sneeze at in the slightest but it’s strange how most media that deals with pets is only about the human, even when it’s about the dog. Weirdly enough, given the human-dog relationship’s reliance on non-verbal cues, you’d imagine there’d be just a bit more to it in the modern era. But a dog’s passing is a formative trauma for many, and it’s a weeping wound, never able to wholly crust over and heal, that stings all the more because we know that it’s never going to go away.
With all that said, what the fuck do you do with a dog movie in which none of the dogs die, and they behave like straight-up frat house monster animals, albeit with hearts of gold? Well, hopefully, you’ll laugh: Strays is a surprisingly funny movie if you’re as genuinely sophomoric in mindset as I am, and it’s mainly due to clever writing and a genuinely well-assembled voice cast. Our lead, a naive little pup named Reggie, is voiced by Will Ferrell, who applies his tried-and-tested hyper-innocent voice (think Elf) to hilarious and occasionally moving ends. See, Reggie was adopted by a not-so-kindly couple and happened to imprint on Doug (Will Forte), one of the most despicable motherfuckers depicted in all of pet-centric cinema. He’s a layabout stoner with what seems like inexhaustible reserves of cruelty, and Reggie loves him desperately, even though he’s only still with Doug because the dude wanted to get one up on his ex during a breakup.
The opening of Strays is so witheringly bitter and nihilistic that I genuinely worried the whole movie would be like that, but things change when Doug finally abandons Reggie in a city three hours away from him. It’s in an alley that he meets Bugs (Jamie Foxx), a Boston Terrier who’s been living on the mean streets for years and years and acts as a kind of Artful Dodger to the little vulnerable dogs who come by, teaching them where to snatch pizza off the ground and where to get drunk off of trash-bag hooch from shitty bars around the city.
After a night of fun and lawn-gnome fucking with an Australian Shepherd, Maggie (Isla Fisher), and a Great Dane, Hunter (Randall Park, the film’s stealth MVP), who are two collared friends of Bugs’ whose owners don’t give a shit if they’re off leash, the dogs hear Reggie’s story and realize how patently fucked up it is. Heaps of verbal abuse, occasional physical abuse, and literal abandonment that would horrify anybody are laid out for them, with Reggie interpreting them as love. It’s at that point that the pair go off on their journey to get Reggie home, but with one key twist on the formula: they’re not going to reunite a bashful dog with his caring owner; they’re going to bite that motherfucker’s cock off. And, sure enough, it’s a decently wild ride, with fireworks, attempted kidnappings by hawks, psychedelic mushrooms, and a jailbreak from the pound all standing between them and their goal. These antics are, as expected, pretty rote and formulaic for a lot of these adventures – it’s basically just your modern road trip comedy with some Beggin’ Strips tossed in – but the dog twist makes it relatively novel, with there being some decently swell twists on the method tossed in, primarily centered around the dogs’ experiences of these events and their attempts to process them. It’s surprisingly character-driven, with the foursome at the film’s core doing a pretty good job lifting the material’s heavier aspects while keeping things frequently light and airy.
The issue, on the other hand, is that the dogs look kind of terrifying once their digitally-enhanced mouths attempt to make human speech, which genuinely lends itself well to any argument as to why Garfield should just think his thoughts and not actually verbalize them to Jon. It’s just distracting, though it gets less bad once you’re exposed to it, and it’s easier to imagine how the film might be made just a little better if they relied on their well-trained animal actors a little more instead of a VFX studio. And then there’s the sentiment: It is a dog movie, after all, so it comes with the territory, so it can ring a little saccharine at times – there are, of course, sob story reveals about tragic pasts and guilt about owners and dogs just wanting to be loved, dammit – but, again, it is somehow significantly cheerier than your average maudlin dog drama while also making one feel something, even if it isn’t necessarily as obviously-executed.
Yet that’s why it works so much better than all of those stupid movies. Strays is refreshing in how it hits the high notes of sentimentality while also patently rejecting the way pet ownership has been sold to us through other forms of media. Not is it more accurate to the day-to-day life of living with a canine companion – they’re little eat-shit-piss-fuck gremlins who love us deeply, and that’s why we love them – but it speaks to a greater truth about the animal as something more than merely just an object of affection or as a compliment to human life. They are, after all, creatures of the world, with their own little personalities and quirks, and each deserves appropriate levels of care, not because they’re made valuable by their presence in our homes and hearts but because they just are. Dramatizing them in this fashion, without the directly kid-friendly approach taken by the Secret Life of Pets series or the bizarre faux-samsara of those Josh Gad-voiced motherfuckers in the Dog’s Purpose movies (who have cameo shout-outs here, with one being genuinely funny until it drifts into obviousness), stresses this point – they are wonderful, weird as hell, and they are individuals. The kindness that the film extends to them is an oddly genuine one, and I wish more movies about people could capture it. But hey, it’s weird that we got Strays at all, so let’s treasure that.