Movie Thoughts: Marmaduke (2022)

• Released: May 6, 2022
  
• Directed by: Mark A.Z. Dippé, Youngki Lee, Phil Nibbelink
  
• Running time: 1 h 28 min
• Rating 0.5/5

Synopsis

A professional dog trainer takes on the task of training the world's most un-trainable dog in hopes of winning the prize at the World Dog Show.

My Thoughts

I think I may have found the worst movie I've watched in 2022 so far. Yes, worse than Home on the Range. Despite how shit that movie was, it at least looked visually somewhat decent and competent. Whereas this... where do we begin.

Story: makes no sense. Why would a trainer try to train Marmaduke, literally no one would let him enter a professional dog show as it's made clear he has no pedigree? But in this world this logic doesn't apply despite it being brought up as a point of contention. Why bring it up in the first place, then?

The characters are shit. Little to no personality, cringe acting and they go through the most cookie cutter basic character development you can imagine. They feel unorganized.

Humor? Don't get me started on how unfunny this thing is. The creators also seem to have a fetish for inflation and farts because there's so a drawn-out very uncomfortable scene of an morbidly obese Marmaduke having to pass the biggest fart ever. What the hell, keep your goddamn fetishes out of kid's movies please?

As for the visuals, honestly the most mind-boggling part for me, they're so weird. This doesn't just feel amateur, it feels amateur to the point it barely had any idea of what it was doing. The character designs lack any semblance of structure and look like they would work much better in 2D than 3D. Pretty much nobody looks right. The textures also look shit and more like an early 2000s direct-to-DVD sequel rather than a 2022 release. The animation is arguably even worse: they move so aimlessly and it really looks like the animators were purposefully half-assing it because nobody's movement looks or feels remotely right. 

And don't give me the "it's trying to be very toon-y like Hotel Transylvania"-schtick. Yes, the characters in Hotel Transylvania move goofy as all hell, but you could still clearly tell that the animators were very competent at their jobs and used the principles very well. The characters there moved a bit unnaturally, but it still looked good because it used these animation techniques to its advantage. And even then it had some more natural-looking slow scenes when the moment called for it.

But this movie looks so amateur it looks like it doesn't even know the basic animation principles, the animation feels so off. I've reviewed quite a few shit-looking movies on this here blog, but this is by far one of the worst animated ones I've ever reviewed or even just seen in general. Even just the talking scenes are awkward as hell because of how uncanny and aimless the movements of the characters are. Heck, on Marmaduke himself there's even quite a few instances where they animate his lower and upper jaws separately from the rest of his head. The lower jaw makes sense, but the upper jaw, the muzzle, is literally attached to the skull, so it looks awkward as hell when they move as if they're two separate units.

The voice acting was also pretty bad, particularly from the kid characters. And the movie overall just makes so little sense. At one point Marmaduke wants to convince the dog trainer, who has given up on him at this point, to keep training him. So what does the dog do? He literally runs around the entire world. Yes, literally. And this is brought up a total of like three times across the entire movie. 

This movie is honestly one of the worst I've ever seen. I will give it that one extra single point for not having the cliché of Marmaduke winning the show at the end, but other than that there's literally nothing redeemable about this movie and it's very unappealing to sit through, both because of the weird narrative decisions, obvious fetish fodder "humor" and of course some of the worst animation ever put to screen.