Movie Thoughts: A Dog's Way Home (2019)

• Released: 11 January 2019
• Directed by: Charles Martin Smith
• Running time: 1 h 36 min
• Rating 3.5/5

Synopsis

A dog ends up separated from her owner and embarks on a two-year long journey across the American wilderness in order to re-unite with him.

My Thoughts

This movie in every sense of the word is pretty mediocre. It's not good, it's not bad. I did hear that apparently back when this was coming out the trailer spoiled literally the entire thing, which is obviously a stupid move. Honestly that's why I tend to avoid movie trailers these days in general.

But despite the movie being pretty standard, just a movie about a pet traversing a long distance to get back home (like Homeward Bound), I do like the execution here. I like Bella and her owners. I like how dedicated she is to them. I like how she has a strong connection to felines because she was raised by them. I like how much she's willing to help the veterans at the hospital.

The journey itself also felt pretty grand. Like, it didn't just take a few weeks or months for her to reach her owner, but well over two years, so a decent chunk of her short canine life.

The best part of the movie, however, is the really wholesome subplot where Bella takes in and raises an orphaned mountain lion cub. She didn't need to do that, and before that happened she was 100% focused on returning to her master, but she did it anyways. The rest of the movie is just okay but this subplot really was just so cute and wholesome. Also, I'm very glad that the cougar cub is entirely CGI rather than them using an actual animal. 

Something I also thought was kinda interesting was that they somehow couldn't get actual coyotes to play the coyotes, so they went with the weird alternative of using coydogs/coywolves instead? Like that's totally fine, but then don't refer to them as coyotes when they're so obviously not. 

 

One major criticism I do have for this movie though is that Bella's inner voice and narration just didn't feel necessary. Whoever voices her does does a fine job, but honestly I feel like whatever was going on on screen was communicated to the viewer pretty well without any words, so to constantly have Bella's narrator-voice reiterate what was happening was kinda annoying and felt like it was pandering to the audience. How would you like it if Spirit's narrator-voice would never shut the hell up during Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron and commented on everything that happened to him? Kinda annoying, right? Like, okay, Bella wasn't constantly talking, but her voice just plainly wasn't needed. Or if they really wanted to have her narrate-talk over the movie, they could just use her voice sparingly instead. This was overkill.

Overall this is not a great movie and I totally get why most people think of it as just mediocre. What really elevates it for me just the really wholesome subplot regarding Big Kitten and an overall pretty grand-feeling journey.