Ever heard of the game “fetch and f**k”? In Strays, a live-action film about talking dogs, hapless border terrier Reggie (voiced by Will Ferrell – stay with me) is really, really good at it. His horrible owner Doug (Will Forte) drives miles from home, then throws a ball as far as he can to try and get rid of his loyal pet. The uncomprehending Reggie goes to fetch it and when, somehow, he makes his way back home, Doug says, “F**k.”
Reggie, with his unnervingly innocent eyes and unsettling moving mouth, becomes a stray when one round of fetch and f**k simply doesn’t end leaving him abandoned. He meets scrappy and horny Boston Terrier Bug (Jamie Foxx), the impossibly elegant Australian Shepherd Maggie (Isla Fisher) and majestic, muscular Great Dane Hunter (Randall Park), his newfound chosen family. The realisation is then twofold: Reggie is a good boy, misunderstood by his owner and still full of so much promise; and this good boy must be avenged. Doug must pay for his cruelty.
What unfolds is a resolutely adult comedy with exclusively kid-level jokes. There is too much profanity to take your eight-year-old, but then the endless toilet humour is perhaps tailor-made for them. There’s a sweet, existential thread hiding beneath the surface – these dogs are worthy of love, and can find companionship in one another – yet the priority of director Josh Greenbaum (who worked in a similar register on 2021’s raunchy comedy Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar) is big, rude laughs – and a lot of them.
The obsession with gross-out gimmicks detracts from some otherwise potentially deep material, but it’s hard to deny how effective some of them are. A violently exaggerated fireworks display from a dog’s perspective, a silly acid trip set to Mr Oizo’s abrasive 1999 hit Flat Beat (which gave the world the puppet Flat Eric), and an annoyingly perfect Miley Cyrus needle drop bringing to life the film’s most aggressive revenge mission: led, like the rest of the film, by these dogs’ fixation on sex, genitals, drugs and bodily fluids.
Strays might be best enjoyed as a surface-level romp that lets these genuinely sweet dogs run wild, but falters when you try and take seriously its adult intentions. Man’s best friend has his own ambitions here – and he doesn’t always care what you think of them.
In cinemas
89 mins, cert 15
