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Snow Dogs
1/2
Cinema Releases - May 31, 2002
Rated on a 4-star scale. Certificate PG. USA.
99 minutes. Directed by Brian Levant. Written by Mark Gibson, Michael Goldberg,
Philip Halprin, Jim Kouf, Tommy Swerdlow; suggested by the book "Winterdance:
The Fine Madness of Running the Iditarod" by Gary Paulsen. Starring Cuba
Gooding Jr, James Coburn, Nichelle Nichols, M. Emmet Walsh, Graham Greene,
Sisqo, Joanna Pacalso; with the voices of James Belushi, Jane
Sibbett.
Poor, poor Cuba Gooding Jr. What can one say of
the guy? Five years ago he was an Oscar-winner, and now he pops up in pictures
like "Rat Race", "Zoolander" and "Pearl Harbor". Here we see him in
"Snow Dogs", a godawful kids' flick about a superstar California
dentist who discovers he was adopted and that his biological mother has just
died. She lived in Alaska, and, as Cuba discovers, shared a house with a
pack of wolves. The movie is a fish-out-of-water comedy in which a big city
guy begins to react badly against small town life, and then of course ends
up settling in and finding the beauty in simple things... and it exists to
show Cuba getting pulled around on a sled by a bunch of wild dogs, yelpin'
an' screamin' all crazy-like.
"Snow Dogs" inspires us to stare at the screen
in pity. Watching Cuba thrashing about in the cold, falling over, screaming
"Yaaargh!", I wondered if his career could ever recover. This is a movie
full of gestures that would look over-the-top in primary school plays, with
actors dropping their jaws, bulging their eyes, letting phones fall out of
their hands, and going "Bwahahahahaha!" before abruptly
stopping.
James Coburn is far too legendary and tough to
play a grizzly local in a movie like this, but here he is, and every time
he comes onscreen the soundtrack whomps us with ominous horn sounds and twangling
banjo notes. He and Cuba have a scene in which they keep screaming, "No,
maybe you need your head examined!" at each other for an entire
minute. The pop singer Sisqo appears in a role so undirected that it comes
across less like a performance than desperate pranking in between
takes.
This is not just a bad movie, it's a bad movie
with Michael Bolton songs, which explains the half-star rating. It would
be okay for kids, because it has a lot of energy -- maybe I would have enjoyed
it when I was six, back in those days when the films of Chevy Chase were
every bit as thrilling as those of Satyajit Ray.
Incidentally, the credits inform me that James
Belushi provided the voice for one of the dogs. There is only one sequence
in which the movie provides a visualisation of dogs talking, and I find it
hard to believe that the filmmakers would hire a star like Belushi for just
one scene. Maybe the DVD will feature a deleted scene in which Cuba's hounds
have a long, thoughtful conversation about Keats -- or at least
Crufts.
COPYRIGHT©
2002 Ian Waldron-Mantgani
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