In a sentenceA wheelchair, a Piaf wig, a warehouse of trained dogs and a plot that would not be trained
A police patrol stops a truck on a New Jersey road at night. The driver, Douglas (Caleb Landry Jones), wears a blonde wig and a bloodied evening dress, and the back of the truck is full of dogs. In the holding cell, psychiatrist Evelyn (Jojo T. Gibbs) is sent to find out who he is, and he tells her. As a boy (Lincoln Powell), Douglas lived with a father, Mike (Clemens Schick), who bred fighting dogs in the yard, a brother, Richie (Alexander Settineri), who took the father’s side, and a mother (Iris Bry) who left. When Douglas sided with the dogs he was locked in their cage. Grown up and in a wheelchair, he works at a shelter, houses the strays nobody wants in a derelict building, and finds that they will do whatever he asks.
Plays from YouTube when you press play; nothing loads from them until then.
Caleb Landry Jones gives the whole of himself to a lonely man in a wheelchair who robs the rich with dogs and sings Piaf in a wig, and Luc Besson does not know what to do with him. Odd, watchable, and thinner than it looks.
Luc Besson has written and directed a film about a man who prefers dogs to people and has been given every reason to. Douglas (Caleb Landry Jones) is stopped by the police one night at the wheel of a truck, in a blonde wig and a dress with blood down the front, with a pack of dogs in the back. A psychiatrist, Evelyn (Jojo T. Gibbs), is sent to his cell to find out what he is, and he tells her, at length. Besson opens on a line from Lamartine, “Wherever there is an unfortunate, God sends a dog”, and for the next 115 minutes he illustrates it.
The childhood is the strongest stretch. Douglas’s father Mike (Clemens Schick) breeds fighting dogs in the yard, and when the boy (Lincoln Powell) takes their side he is locked in the cage with them, while his brother Richie (Alexander Settineri) looks on. We were horrified, and what did it was how ordinary Besson made it look: a chain-link pen on scrubby grass, a house with its lights on a few yards away, a child sleeping with his face between a dog’s paws. The dogs do not hurt him. What happens next belongs to the first act and leaves him in a wheelchair, and we will say no more than that.
Grown up, Douglas works at a dog shelter, keeps the animals nobody claims, and lives with them in a derelict building where they come when he calls. The dogs are the film’s best idea and its best performers. They open doors, stand guard in rows, and carry other people’s jewellery down other people’s staircases. We laughed, at a small dog trotting out of a mansion with a necklace in its mouth, and then wondered whether Besson was laughing too. We think he was. The trouble is that he wants the man’s suffering taken seriously at the same pitch, in the same scene, and the two do not fit.
Jones gives Douglas a soft, careful voice and no vanity at all. He plays a man who has been hurt so thoroughly that he has stopped expecting anything, and when the film lets him sit still with Gibbs he is quietly good. He is better than that on stage. Douglas finds performing through a drama class run by Salma (Grace Palma) and ends up in a club, in a black wig under one light, mouthing Piaf with everything from the ribs up while the chair stays where it is. It is the point at which we stopped being embarrassed on the film’s behalf and started watching it. Éric Serra’s score keeps low and out of the way of the songs, which is sensible; the songs are the better music.
The structure works against all of this. Everything is told from the cell, so Julien Rey has to cut back to Gibbs’s patient face every few minutes, and each episode is announced before we see it and explained after. Gibbs is steady and unshowy and given nothing but questions. Colin Wandersman and Adrien Bertolle shoot the interview room flat and grey, the club warm, and the late violence mostly in the dark, so that when the action finally arrives it is hard to tell which dog is doing what to whom. A gangster, El Verdugo (John Charles Aguilar), turns up in the second half, and the story takes turns we will not describe, except to say that the film gets less interesting the more blood it spills.
Besson’s Léon, from 1994, was also about a damaged loner with a strange domestic arrangement and a violent trade, and it knew exactly what it was. Dogman wants to be a case history, a fable, a heist comedy and a revenge picture, and says its theme aloud every twenty minutes in case we have lost the thread. Hugues Tissandier’s derelict building, all mattresses, cages and a dressing-table mirror, is the one place where the film’s several moods manage to live together. Corinne Bruand dresses Douglas for the stage with more care than the script takes over anything else.
The reviews have run from a rave to one star, sometimes about the same scenes, and we are in the middle: with the sceptics on the story, with the admirers on Jones. Worth an evening if you can take a film that changes its mind about what it is every reel, and the 15 certificate is earned by the cage as much as by anything later. The dogs are excellent throughout and never once look as though they have read the script.
The critic praises the electrifying performance by Caleb Landry Jones in this oddly wonderful, borderline brilliant tale of resilience and revenge.
Read the full review →The critic finds the film a bit silly but often pulled off thanks to Caleb Landry Jones' commanding performance as the traumatized, drag-performing vigilante. He singles out for praise Jones' standout drag lip-sync scene as one of the best in recent memory.
Read the full review →The film is a bizarre and macabre drama-thriller that is watchable overall. Caleb Landry Jones gives an oddly engaging performance as the central character, though the story is shallow and adds up to nothing much.
Read the full review →Luc Besson's latest is flawed and sometimes fun as a curious tale of a lonely man finding companionship with dogs. The critic singles out the ultra-violence as where the film fumbles, turning tedious, though the core idea of a pup-loving Pied Piper has merit.
Read the full review →The critic describes the wacky thriller as a mixed bag in need of a leash, with Jones playing a traumatized dog collector turned cabaret star. He notes the film’s uneven execution under Besson’s direction.
Read the full review →The film is a fatally uneven drama that brings together Besson’s extreme tendencies without inspired feverishness; Jones' performance grounds it but Besson’s instincts lead astray.
Read the full review →
LéonBesson’s earlier damaged loner, with a hitman’s trade and a houseplant instead of dogs.
White God · not reviewed yetHungarian film in which the city’s dogs rise up; the pack scenes are astonishing.
Umberto D.De Sica’s old man and his small dog, with nothing to lose but each other.
Hedwig and the Angry Inch · not reviewed yetA wounded life told from a stage in a wig, and the songs are the point.
Wendy and Lucy · not reviewed yetKelly Reichardt’s quiet account of a woman, a dog and very little money.
Free account
Two lists that know where things are streaming, collections you can share, your own score beside ours, and Discover that remembers what you have seen.
