John Travolta and Robin Williams team up in the Walt Disney Company's Old Dogs, a family comedy that pairs the two as close business partners whose lives are thrown into disarray when twin seven-year-olds are put into their care. Travolta's wife, Kelly Preston, co-stars, along with the couple's daughter, Ella, who makes her big-screen debut here. Wild Hogs helmer Walter Becker directs a script by Evolution scribes David Diamond and David Weissman, with producing duties going to Andrew Panay,
Peter Abrams, and Robert Levy. ~ Jeremy Wheeler, Rovi
It's kind of a funny story. Actually it isn't. And not much in this movie is, unless you like to watch elderly dogs urinate, middle-aged movie stars overact wildly, and Seth Green get hit in the groin by a golf ball.
Travolta, who delivers an impressively enthusiastic performance, seems to have no idea that he's stuck in one of the year's worst movies. The perpetually pained expression on Williams' face, however, suggests he knows otherwise.
Heartless, brainless and unable to do anything with what it does have to offer, Old Dogs doesn't know who it's for or what it's offering. It just needs to get made because people have to have something to do. Spare yourself and your kids.
John Travolta and Robin Williams are no strangers to shamelessness. But not even they can walk away from "Old Dogs" with a shred of dignity - a mean-spirited, insulting "family" film that essentially pees down its leg and calls it comedy.
Featuring a mixed-up-medication gag, a guy-in-a-gorilla-suit gag and a suntan-gone-wrong gag...well, you begin to understand the level of inspiration that went into the execution of the film.
The jokes are played painfully safe and not even the fleeting presence of a few a name faces detracts from the sheer inanity of the plot and outright creepiness of the film's central pairing.
A slapdash embarrassment of feeble age gags and cultural stereotypes, Old Dogs is at once crass, corny, amateurish, insulting, uninspired, deeply phoney and extraordinarily unfunny.
At the screening I attended I didn't hear one person laugh, though I did hear plenty of involuntary sighs and groans, some of them emanating from myself.
Most repellent is the undercurrent of homophobia, the brutal cultural stereotyping and the fact that Travolta looks like a man wearing a slightly melted rubber John Travolta Hallowe'en mask.
I really love Old Dogs. Even just on the soul fact that John Travolta and Robin Williams are in a movie together was enough to get my attention, but the result is comic gold. After seeing this around three times for some reason, I still think it's just as funny. Now I can see why this was critically bashed beyond
belief and people in general just hate it, but it doesn't affect me in the slightest. I think the reason I find this to be so funny is the fact that it takes middle-aged jokes to the extreme. The pill mix-up thing gets me every time as well as the extra tan session. Then there's the great cameos from Matt Dillon and a redneck Justin Long that really send it over the top.
I couldn't stop laughing on people getting hit in the nuts by golf balls, but that, at least, is worth a smile. Not so the moment Dan (Robin Williams) enters a tanning booth and - gasp! - ends up turning browner than an M&M thanks to an operational mishap. And when he and Charlie (John Travolta) discuss their
complicated regime of pills and their side-effects, you can be sure that within minutes they'll be taking the wrong ones by mistake, leading to all sorts of high jinks. It's light entertainment in the truest sense of the word, being light on both laughs and substance. Williams and Travolta as two lifelong friends and business partners share a remarkably poor chemistry. In the film's favour is that the youngsters, Emily and Zach - the former played by Travolta's real-life daughter, Ella Beau - are likable rather than cloying, Seth Green is, sadly, under-used, and the fact that everyone has to mug so hard for their laughs is an unfortunate consequence of the writing just not being funny enough.
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