The Secret Life of Pets Review

7 out of 10

Cast:

Louis C.K. as Max

Eric Stonestreet as Duke

Kevin Hart as Snowball

Jenny Slate as Gidget

Albert Brooks as Tiberius

Lake Bell as Chloe

Hannibal Buress as Buddy

Steve Coogan as Ozone

Dana Carvey as Pops

Bobby Moynihan as Mel

Ellie Kemper as Katie

Directed by Chris Renaud and Yarrow Cheney

The Secret Life of Pets Review:

What do cats and dogs do all day while we’re gone? Mostly exactly what we think they do, plus the odd chase through the streets of New York with animal control and the anti-human pet underground.

It’s not a particularly novel concept (mostly), but it’s not supposed to be either. Animation powerhouse Illumination Entertainment (Despicable Me) has made its name off of clever sight gags wrapped around semi-high concept premises and that’s the way they seem to like it.

Certainly there’s an audience for that sort of thing and at some primal level is that the point of any story even if satisfying that point only delivers momentary satisfaction. It begs the question, is there any real need for a film to linger after we’ve seen it, or is a quick disposable bite just as nourishing?

Director Chris Renaud certainly bends towards the latter notion, in execution if not in conception. The Secret Life of Pets is a film about setting up and paying off sight gags and it’s very good at that, mostly centered around cute little dog Max (Louis C.K.) and his life and death struggle with new roommate Duke (Stonestreet) for the affections of their owner (Kemper). It’s cute with gags both well set up and well delivered and just left-field enough to be truly funny, such as a crotchety falcon (Brooks) envisioning teaming up with an adorable yap dog (Slate) to dive-bomb unsuspecting prey together.

It doesn’t do anything else (and most of the jokes fade about thirty minutes after viewing), but it’s also very clear that it doesn’t really care to. This is the dicey terrain where questions of entertainment value versus ‘inherent quality’ value start to come up, but that’s a false equivalence which misses the rewards and flaws of films like Pets. We tend to write off the choice between being entertaining and being ‘good’ as picking between easy and difficult paths, but being entertaining is really, really hard.

Being both entertaining and good require surprise to work. Giving an audience exactly what it wants exactly the way it wants has a short half-life; giving them what they don’t know they want is where any measure of quality (from acting to thematic depth to adrenaline-fueled action scenes) starts to appear.

Even if the focus is on stunts and gags, a film needs to grow and develop how it approaches such things or people will get tired of watching it while it is still on. As clever as Pets is in its best moments, it refuses to accept that fact even as the plot grows stranger and stranger with the introduction of Kevin Hart’s crazed magician’s rabbit Snowball, who plans to do away with all pet owners.

The goal is as many set ups and pay offs as possible and that is a lot easier to reach when reusing the same setups and the same payoffs over and over.

The cast does a steady job, particularly Slate and Hart who have the benefit of the best characters in the film. Slate’s Gidget is an optimistic little yap dog who will see the good in anyone but certainly won’t let that stop her from tearing the city to pieces to find her true love Max, while Snowball is sympathetic and compelling villain. Any time either is on screen, Pets becomes imminently more watchable (C.K. on the other hand is wasted).

And the Illumination animators have become extremely adapt at the visual sight gag – it’s easy to imagine Pets as a silent film with just Alexandre Desplat’s jazzy score as accompaniment working just as well as the sound version.

But there it stops as if everyone at the top decided ‘that was good enough.’ Rather than continually coming up with new jokes or new twists on the characters, Renaud and his team are content to take various character quirks they have developed — Tiberius sees everyone as food, Chloe the cat hates everyone who isn’t a cat, etc. — and repeat them over and over again as if they’ll be just as good the 100th time as the first. Finding one intriguing characteristic or funny punch line isn’t enough; repetition erodes entertainment value as surely as it does story or character surprise.

When that happens what’s left truly is disposable; enjoyable in the moment perhaps but gone as soon as it is over. Is that a negative? To some extent it must be; whatever joy was had in the moment of first experience is replaced by an empty hole and no pleasing memory to put in it because the film is too careless to stick.

Going to the movies is a high value experience the same way listening to an album or reading a book are; all three require the most precious commodity we have in payment – time. Any film which doesn’t offer up a suitable reward for that cost, whether by design or by negligence, has not kept up its end of the bargain and isn’t worth the sacrifice. The Secret Life of Pets sits on a high wire above that border, trying to decide which way to fall.