Movie Thoughts: Underdog (2007)

• Released: August 3rd, 2007
• Directed by: Frederik Du Chau
• Running time: 1h 24min
• Rating 2.5/5

Synopsis

A dog named Shoeshine accidentally gains superpowers and now must protect his town against a mad scientist.

My Thoughts

This is one of these movies I desperately wanted to see as a kid (because talking dog movie) but just never ended up seeing. So now I've finally gotten the opportunity to check it out.

And yeah...it ain't very good. I didn't hate this movie, it is okay enough for me not to give it a two-star or lower rating, but this ain't very good, either. 

I guess I do like the character of Shoeshine and his relationship with Jack is okay (albeit very generic). The CGI hasn't aged the best but it doesn't look terrible, either. The villain duo of Barsinister and Cad was also pretty amusing.

But that's kinda all I can give the movie. It is still very clichéd, its humor wasn't very funny (bar one or two jokes), it still falls into the "dogs rule cats suck" stereotype these type of movies often fall into (a trope I hate). I'm also in general not really a superhero movie fan, so the whole superhero aspect of the movie didn't do much for me. The romance between Shoeshine and Polly was also generic as all hell.

I also think that the villain being the only disabled character was quite ableist. It'd have been one thing if there'd been other (good) disabled characters, but Barsinister is the only little person/person with a leg disability/person with a facial difference and he's an irredeemable villain. So like, not cool to portray him as the only disabled character and also having him be morally reprehensible. 

Overall this just ain't a good movie. I've definitely seen worse, and I did enjoy this to an extent, but if I had the choice I'd probably never re-watch this.