It can be fun to watch a gifted character chew scenery, especially when the performer has a good script and\/or supportive collaborators. Caleb Landry Jones has neither in \u201cDogman,\u201d a sweaty, listless crime drama about a handicapped dog shelter owner who\u2019s also an amateur drag performer. Jones (\u201cNitram,\u201d \u201cGet Out\u201d) plays Doug, a canine-loving misfit whose twitchy personality and flamboyant behavior only seems ideally suited to the gifted actor. Jones pouts and murmurs at sub-decibel levels throughout and\u00a0leans so hard into writer\/director Luc Besson\u2019s tin-eared dialogue and chintzy image-making that it soon becomes impossible to enjoy watching him bluster his way through a rare lead role.<\/p>\n
Besson (\u201cThe Fifth Element\u201d) often encourages Jones to take big swings in his performance as Doug, a soft-spoken showboat who\u2019s constantly tested and underestimated by a litany of cosmic injustices. Doug\u2019s a sullen martyr with a mood board of singularly endearing underdog qualities\u2014in addition to saving pooches, Doug also loves cosplaying as Edith Piaf\u2014that Besson and Jones never pull together into a compelling character study. <\/p>\n
In his smaller roles, Jones tends to get by on his waxey, hard looks, which suggest a coy, mercurial presence who acts out with alarming regularity. Jones always looks sickly and threatening, all roving eyes and watery scowls. So you can easily imagine why he was cast as Doug, who gets arrested in an early scene while wearing a tacky pink dress, with matching forearm-length gloves, and then spends most of the movie recalling his sordid backstory to the sympathetic, but under-developed police psychiatrist Dr. Evelyn Decker (Jojo T. Gibbs). <\/p>\n
Jones braces himself with an unfortunate Blanche DuBois southern accent and a preening hard stare throughout Doug\u2019s meandering conversations with Evelyn. Neither of these stock gestures becomes more endearing with over-use, especially given how unconvincing Besson\u2019s dialogue tends to be, and how over-edited most of Doug and Evelyn\u2019s dialogue scenes are, too. <\/p>\n
Evelyn usually sets Doug up for more self-pitying observations about his sad life. Some choppy flashbacks confirm how unlovable and neglectful the world can be, even for a proud survivor like Doug. He will eventually strut out of his wheelchair, with some over-emphasized difficulty, and drape himself across a silhouette of Christ\u2019s cross. \u201cI am standing\u2014for you!\u201d Doug yells while \u201cNon, Je Ne Regrette Rien\u201d blares on the soundtrack. <\/p>\n
Campy and joyless, Doug\u2019s story isn\u2019t even fun when it takes detours into the cabaret night club world of drag. There\u2019s so much flat, uninflected build-up to these scenes, too, and no clich\u00e9 seems to have been left out of Doug\u2019s exhausting account of why he\u2019s such a quirky-sad anomaly. In Jones-less flashbacks, we see a young Doug (Lincoln Powell) thrown into a dog kennel and then antagonized by his sanctimonious older brother Richie (Alexander Settineri), who wears a big cross around his neck, and his cartoonishly overbearing father Mike (Clemens Schick), another violent pseudo-Christian. These dismal establishing scenes mainly reflect Besson\u2019s knowledge of hoary pulp fiction clich\u00e9s. Sometimes cute, well-trained dogs show up and do some tricks. They also deserve better material. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It can be fun to watch a gifted character chew scenery, especially when the performer has a good script and\/or supportive collaborators. Caleb Landry Jones has neither in \u201cDogman,\u201d a sweaty, listless crime drama about a handicapped dog shelter owner who\u2019s also an amateur drag performer. Jones (\u201cNitram,\u201d \u201cGet Out\u201d) plays Doug, a canine-loving misfit …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[36,50,45],"class_list":["post-1125","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-action-movies","tag-action","tag-crime","tag-drama"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1125","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1125"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1125\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1125"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1125"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1125"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}