We journey to the opposite end of the quality scale with my next film, another Disney offering in the mangy form of 2009’s Santa Buddies: The Legend of Santa Paws. This is, I believe, the ninth instalment in the House of Mouse’s moderately successful direct-to-video Air Bud franchise about talking dogs. The series started out being about a dog that played basketball, before spiraling off in increasingly mad directions for its seemingly never-ending follow-ups. Disney like to follow their business model of continuously churning out more of the same crap as long as it makes money, but if this film is any indicator, that model does not guarantee an enjoyable time at the movies.
In this one, talking golden retriever pup Puppy Paws (voice of Zachary Gordon), the high-spirited son of Santa’s head dog Santa Paws (voice of Tom Bosley) gets tired of the North Pole, so heads off to suburban USA where he meets mischievous pooch Budderball who is -uh oh - on the Naughty List. He figures Budderball is just the dog to show him how to live life as a normal pup and they get into ‘hilarious’ scrapes before becoming embroiled in the obligatory mission to Save Christmas.
I watch this on a cold Saturday morning while trying and failing miserably to dismantle some old furniture without injuring myself and a pretty horrific experience. The special effects for the talking puppies are decent, but nobody involved in this thing really seems like they’re trying or having a good time. Cheers’ George Wendt seems like an inspired choice to play Santa but he seems depressed, doesn’t appear to know what to do with his hands and is definitely phoning it in. He spends his handful of scenes just standing there like a big, sad sack of spuds, probably wondering where it all went wrong.
As in The Magic Snowflake, in Santa Paws’ world, the symbol of the world’s Christmas Spirit is a big lump of ice, in this case a magic icicle that’s – oh no! – melting. However, apparently Puppy Paws making pals with some ‘streetwise’ pooches and freeing some puppies from a pound run by evil dogcatcher Christopher Lloyd is enough to increase all the Christmas Spirit on Earth and Save Christmas. It feels like the writers on this one hardly tried at all. I’m also confused as to why we’re meant to think the dogcatcher is the antichrist when his biggest sin seems to be not giving a free dog away to a disabled kid? The man’s got bills to pay, surely?
Lloyd is, thankfully, the film’s highlight having quite nicely grown into these roles where he plays creepy, slightly crazy dishevelled villainous types. His transformation from humbug holiday-hater into a carol-loving, joy-to-the-world good guy is the pinnacle of a poor movie.
Still, if you came to see a gang of cute labrador pups pulling Santa’s sleigh, you won’t be disappointed. At least the film has cute animals to keep the kids happy, but it’s like someone realised that those adorable Youtube videos of puppies and kittens that everyone loves don’t have a plot either, so why should this? It’s all very tedious.
I keep thinking what an odd choice it was to make this film live action when all the natural personality of the dogs is CGI’d out. Close-up shots of the canines conversing are fine, but long-shots of the pooches doing ‘human’ stuff look awful, like they’ve been replaced by shiny fake plastic lawn decorations.
Again, one of my main bugbears in many of these festive flicks, is that there is just no elf consistency. Here, up at the North Pole some of Santa’s assistants are played by normal-sized children, some by little people, some by normal-sized adults. It’s almost as if the people who made this film didn’t give a damn.
This is a prime example of the sort of crap that’s made by disinterested grown-ups and bought by the parents of children too young to have a say in the matter. But hey, it’s got cute puppies in it, right? This is the first film I’ve endured that properly pisses me off and I pray to God my child never forces me to watch another one of these god-awful ‘Buddie’ adventures.
Comentários