Why has there never been a more adult themed talking dog movie? Actually… why hasn’t there been any talking dog movies for a while? Around the time that The Art of Racing in the Rain came out, I swear there was a talking animal movie coming out nearly every month. And twice as many books about talking animals.

Well, I think Strays answers that question pretty easily: because this type of movie is just… not good.

As I was watching Strays I realized that I don’t think I have ever enjoyed a movie about talking animals. They usually rely on cheap jokes and even cheaper premises. Let me guess, the dog has to find his way home? To be honest, Strays is just that movie again, but with a different coat of paint. Once again, our main character (Reggie, played by Will Ferrell) is on a quest to find his home. BUT! This time there is a different driving factor. Reggie isn’t searching for home because he is lost from his family. No, no. He is trying to find his way home because he wants to bite his previous owner’s dick off. Yeah that’s right, Strays mixes the lost-from-home plot with a revenge plot. This part was honestly sort of refreshing. But as the movie played out, I realized it was just the same shit we have seen time and time again. The dogs find themselves far from home and the whole movie is them finding their way back home… that’s about it.

Now for the thing that Strays DOES do totally different than any other dog movie: it is rated R. The dogs are raunchy and there are numerous plot points that simply would not fly in Marley and Me. Including the dogs getting drunk, high, and having a late-night gnome-humping session. This movie wants the R rating and does everything it could to get it. But… it’s all just shit jokes, piss jokes, and dick jokes (including a scene where a Great Dane (voiced by Randall Park) is trying to get hard by thinking of the sexy Australian shepherd (voiced by Isla Fisher). The jokes are not very creative to be totally honest. It’s a dick-joke movie as I like to call it. Which is fine but gets old super quick. The novelty of raunchy dogs got old around the twenty-minute mark. Too bad we had another hour and a half to go. With that said, there was one really great scene that seriously stood out amongst the rest. The dogs find themselves with a “narrator dog.” These are the dogs that are the main character of the other, standard dog movies. They just narrate everything and never actually speak. They speak directly to the audience of the movie. The dogs of Strays try to interact with the narrator dog, but all he can do is narrate what is happening. It was a wonderful, creative joke amongst the sea of dick and shit jokes.

Now the part of the movie that I actually enjoyed: the dogs. The dog actors in this movie are so incredibly great. You can tell that they truly cared about catching how dogs actually act. The dogs all tilt their heads when something weird is happening. They all spin around when they go to lay down. They all dig, run, walk, and just act like, well, dogs! It’s excellent. I caught myself completely ignoring the stuff that was being said by the dogs because they are so cute. I loved watching the dogs and sort of wish there was a cut of this movie where the dialog was taken out and I could just watch dogs be cute for an hour and a half. So, a serious shout out to the trainers in the film. The actors are honestly wonderful.

Other than that, what you see is what you get. Strays doesn’t try too hard to be anything other than what it is. It’s not trying to say anything special and it’s not trying to be rememberable in any way. But it’s fine for a one-time viewing. Even if just to see the dogs.

I give Strays a 1.5 out of 4. It’s completely, entirely, a movie that I will forget about in a month. I think it won’t start a trend of R rated animal movies (which isn’t a bad thing). It might get a sequel, but I don’t think I will need to see it. I had fun watching the dogs, but not really the movie. Which is not a good thing to say about a movie. The only thing that really stuck with me is the only female dog peeing by lifting her leg… Which I have never seen a female dog do. Which completely broke the immersion for me. I was seriously so close to thinking this was a documentary. But that leg lift just completely took me out of it. Well, that and maybe the fact that the dogs were talking.