Dogman is a movie that is, to put it bluntly, so batshit crazy that one watches it with the same kind of stunned fascination that they might use to observe a massive car crash. Watching it, you get the sense that writer-director Luc Besson took at least three or four screenplays and crammed them together into one, cheerfully overlooking the fact that none of the elements really fit together in any coherent matter. And yet, it gets so screwy in such inexplicable ways that it begins to exude a strange fascination that cannot be denied—whatever its sins, you certainly haven’t seen anything like this before and it does hold your interest throughout, if only out of a curiosity to see just how loopy it is going to get. Spoiler Alert—it gets very, very loopy indeed.
Besson, as you know, is the French filmmaker who has spent much of his career negotiating the middle road between bombastic Hollywood blockbusters and European-style weirdness, leading to such offbeat hits as La Femme Nikita, The Professional, The Fifth Element and Lucy. In the last few years, however, his once-formidable brand has faltered—his glorious sci-fi fantasy Valerian and the City of a Thousand Worlds was an enormously expensive box-office disaster (though one that I persist in believing will one day achieve cult status), he spent several years fighting accusations of sexual assault in court (which were ultimately dismissed) and his last film, Anna, was little more than a lazy rehash of ideas that he had mined more successfully in the past. Now comes Dogman, a work that is weird even by his often-oddball standards and while it is unlikely to reestablish his commercial standing, at least in the US, it at least demonstrates that if he is going to go down, he is clearly going to go down swinging.
The film’s antihero is one Douglas Munrow (Caleb Landry Jones) and when we first see him, he is being arrested after being pulled over by the cops while dressed in full Marilyn Monroe drag and covered in blood while sitting behind the wheel of a van jam-packed with dogs. In jail, the wheelchair-bound Doug is visited by police psychologist Evelyn (Jojo T. Gibbs) and proceeds to lay out what is essentially his origin story in a series of flashbacks that make up the bulk of the story. As a child, he was raised by an abusive father who kept him locked in a backyard dog kennel—where he was able to develop a keen ability for bonding with his fellow canine captives—until finally being freed, though not before sustaining the injury that would put him in the wheelchair. Afterwards, he is put in a foster home where a good-hearted theatre student (Grace Palma) opens his eyes to the beauty of drama and poetry but inadvertently breaks his heart along the way. He lands a job at a run-down kennel but when the state of New Jersey shuts it down due to budget constraints, he disappears into the night along with all of the dogs in his care.
At this point, Doug elects to use his unnatural rapport with his canine friends to reinvent himself as some kind of ersatz crime lord. He trains his dogs to sneak into house in order to pilfer jewelry from the rich inhabitants in what he claims is a Robin Hood-like attempt to redistribute the wealth. At the same time, he also uses his dogs to help him combat the real bad guys who are making life hard for the less fortunate in the area—when a local crime lord begins strong-arming people for ever-increasing “protection” payments, Doug sends one of his dogs to infiltrate the guy’s lair and grab on to his genitalia by its teeth until he agrees to back down. These activities soon put Doug in the crosshairs of everyone from that aforementioned gang leader to an insurance adjuster who figures out the scheme and tries to use this to his advantage and lead to the inevitable wild conflicts. And if that weren’t enough—and by all logical reason, it should be—Doug also moonlights on the weekends at a local drag cabaret, doing lip-synch performances dressed as Edith Piaf, Marlene Dietrich and the aforementioned Monroe.
In the past, I have been a huge fan of Besson and his decidedly fractured takes on the modern-day blockbuster, most of which he has approached with the giddy exuberance (and occasionally dubious judgement) of a kid trying to tell a story while caught up in the throes of a major sugar rush. That said, while I have to admire Besson for having the sheer nerve to cook up such a bizarro stew of elements as this, especially in the service of a project meant to reestablish his commercial bona fides, the results simply do not come together into anything resembling a cohesive whole, even by his standards. One major problem is that the flashback structure ends up working against the story from the get-go. The only way a narrative as flabbergasting as this is ever going to work is by simply barreling through without giving viewers a moment to think about the nuttiness on display—every time it pauses to return us to visit Doug and Evelyn talking in prison, it loses that momentum and forces us to remember how silly it all is.
Another big problem is that while we certainly get to learn as much as we want about Doug, none of the other characters, especially the villains Doug finds himself battling, are developed in any particularly interesting way, leaving a big hole in the middle of the story. Also, the elaborately conceived and stylishly executed action set pieces that Besson has specialized in throughout his career are practically non-existent here—the scenes in which we see the dogs do their various tricks are little more than slightly harder-edged variations of the things that Benji used to do back in the day and while the climactic siege on Doug’s headquarters offers up a little bit of the old magic, it is far too little and comes far too late to have much impact. And while the notion of making Doug into a part-time drag performer is certainly strange enough to belong in a Besson film, I am not entirely sure that it requires the inclusion of no less than three full performances on his part along the way.
That said, I must concede that whatever the flaws of Dogman, and they are indeed legion, Caleb Landry Jones certainly throws himself into the madness with heedless abandon with another with another fascinatingly strange performance in a career that has already seen him deliver a number of them. As conceived by Besson, both the film and the character of Doug come across as Besson’s screw-loose take on Todd Phillips’s odious Joker and Jones brings just as much intensity to the proceedings as Joaquin Phoenix did in that earlier film. The difference is that while Phoenix delivered a stunt turn that was all method but relatively little genuine madness, Jones somehow manages to bring an identifiably human element to his part that comes closer to grounding the ensuing lunacy in some vaguely recognizable form of reality than one might expect possible from a story like this. Ultimately, he cannot rescue the narrative from itself—towards the end, he seems almost as bewildered by the goings-on as those in the audience—but his willingness to commit to the bit is certainly admirable.
Dogman may not be the worst thing that Besson has ever done as a filmmaker—it is certainly better than such misfires as The Family and the aforementioned Anna—and I guess that it is never exactly boring—barking mad, perhaps (pun intended), but never boring. However, even during its weirdest moments, there is always the sense that this was nothing more than a half-formed idea that Besson has attempted to inflate into a full story by stuffing in everything from out-of-nowhere plot ideas to bizarre anachronisms (do contemporary American jails still use old-fashioned keys to open their locks?) to try to get it across the finish line. The end result is a mess and one that may try the patience of Besson’s remaining fan base. That said, even though I cannot recommend the film, the thing is so peculiar that if my description of it has piqued your curiosity in any way, I would not necessarily dissuade you from seeking it out during what is almost certainly going to be its brief theatrical run—if nothing else, you won’t find yourself coming away from it grumbling that you have seen it all before.