Ignoring the various scandals that have plagued French director Luc Besson in recent years, one can never look at his new projects without mentioning his career highpoints: Films such as La Femme Nikita and The Professional set an impossibly high bar for the assassin thriller genre, while he can at least boast that Lucy was a huge box office smash. Dogman is sortof a mix of all three. It is an absolutely wild revenge fantasy that is at times grim, hyper-violent, and surreal to the point of lunacy. To be honest, I’m not sure it’s actually any good, but it’s watchable for the performance of Caleb Landry Jones and an army of canine pals.
Dogman doesn’t follow the typical rhythms of a revenge movie, but then, very little about it is typical at all. The film is largely told in flashback as Doug (Jones), a crossdressing loner who loves dogs more than people, recounts to troubled psychiatrist Evelyn (Jojo T. Gibbs) a past full of inhuman abuses from his father, brother, and the world. As such, Doug’s quest for vengeance isn’t necessarily against a single person, it is against a world that has molded him through cruelty into the person he is now.
And that person is one who has retreated from reality into a world of isolated fantasy. It all began when he was kept captive in a dog kennel by his father, who took out his anger on Doug to such an extent that it left him permanently crippled. That leads to an eye-opening stretch at a children’s shelter, where he learns Shakespeare from a pretty girl, who ends up leaving him alone to pursue her own dreams. Doug learns disappointment and heartbreak when he finally catches up with her. But the experience also leads him on a path of discovery, finding friendship with the drag artists and doing regular performances as Edith Piaf that inexplicably earn raucous rounds of applause.
But it’s also, while working at a tragic dog kennel, that Doug discovers the true extent of his connection to dogs. And I mean, he’s basically like Ant-Man controlling bugs with his mind. He can ask them to retrieve a bag of sugar and they’ll do it like they all speak the same language. Their connection is uncanny, and Doug uses it to bankroll a certain small-time level of criminality, but also to help others who are being abused by the powerful. It doesn’t make him a lot of friends, who come looking for some bloody payback against the wheelchair-bound Doug and his four-legged accomplices.
There’s a very delicate balance of gritty realism and insane fantasy that Besson is trying to walk here. I like to think that at the height of his powers he could’ve found the right note. He certainly has done so before on a film such as The Fifth Element, while failing miserably to do so with the bloated Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets. Dogman just feels off. I think I would’ve wanted it to go totally off the hook and further into Doug’s obvious psychosis. But Besson also wants this to be a “serious” movie like his greatest critical successes. Jones certainly plays it that way, and is endlessly compelling and impossible to look away from. He’s at his best in roles that stray far from the norm, and Dogman offers the opportunity for him to craft a unique misfit character with depths of pain that reveal themselves in strange ways.
It’s likely that my expectations for Dogman were too high. I am, admittedly, a Luc Besson superfan and have been wanting him to have another great movie for a long time. While Dogman isn’t great, I can guarantee you won’t see another movie like it again this year, possibly ever. And when it’s over you won’t regret having watched it, and that counts for something.
Dogman opens in theaters on March 29th.
