Streaming Service: Peacock
Movie Name/Year: Strays (2023)
Genre: Adventure, Comedy
Length: 1h 33min
Rating: R
Director: Josh Greenbaum
Writer: Dan Perrault
Actors: Will Ferrell, Jamie Foxx,
Isla Fisher, Randall Park, Will Forte, Brett Gelman, Rob Riggle, Josh Gad,
Sofía Vergara, Jamie Demetriou, Greta Lee, Jimmy Tatro, Harvey Guillén, Jack De
Sanz, Phil Morris, Charity Cervantes, Jade Fernandez, Mikayla Rousseau, Aven
Lotz, Dan Perrault, Dennis Quaid, Keith Brooks, Hedy Nasser, Dexter Masland, AJ
Bernard
IMDb Blurb: An abandoned dog teams up
with other strays to get revenge on his former owner.
Cat’s Point of View:
I have struggled to put my thoughts together in order to
review Strays.
My daughter and I saw this in the theater with friends, and
we had a collective consensus as we left post-credits. Never again. (Much to my
husband’s dismay, we’ve told him he’s on his own if he wants to watch it, and
we mean it.)
To be fair to Strays, the movie was funny – hilarious
adjacent - and even touching occasionally. Unfortunately, there was an over-abundance
of toilet humor… and that is in the most literal sense. I’ve seen other reviews
give it the fancy term of ‘scatalogical humor’ but I’ll cut to the chase – poop
jokes. The movie was full of dog poop.
Sure, it’s about dogs…and they poop. Every living being poops
in some form or fashion. It doesn’t stop there, though; and explaining what had
our stomachs churning would be giving spoilers so just take my word on it. If
the thought of feces has you wanting to run to worship porcelain fast and in a
hurry, then Strays may not be the film experience you’re looking for.
The upside to that, I guess, is that now Strays is available on
streaming, you can always pause it to run and ralph in the privacy of your own
home. I did not enjoy holding down my popcorn in the very public theater. (I’m
not squeamish, either. There are just some lines my internal fortitude has
drawn.)
I’m never about tearing a movie down. There were some
positives to Strays. This canine adventure was well executed and I was
impressed that they clearly used real dogs for the majority of the scenes. The
CGI to enable them to “talk” was also very well executed. The story was
endearing, if a little sad, as the clueless, disillusioned, and yet still
hopeless romantic pup takes his new friends on an adventure to wreak revenge on
his former human. The concept, itself, was hilarious. There was even a dog-movie
Easter egg worked in.
When we saw the trailer for the first time, my daughter and
I were immediately on board wanting to watch. This is one of those instances
that the trailer wasn’t exactly misleading, but it didn’t give us an accurate
representation of what we were in store for.
I was also excited to see a film with Jamie Foxx (Day
Shift, They Cloned Tyrone, The Burial). I’m always eager to see what Foxx
has been working on whether it’s big or small screen productions – and especially
while he’s been on medical hiatus from the latter.
Excellent cast and all its best efforts to provide a fun Homeward
Bound: The Incredible Journey (1993) – like adventure focused on revenge
simply couldn’t overcome its own potty jokes to become a film I’d be willing to
recommend to others or even ever watch again. This doesn’t make it a bad movie,
so to speak, but it definitely goes into my personal One-and-Done category in
which very few films reside.
There’s just one more thing to remember: even though Strays
is about cute dogs on an adventure, this is not a movie for kids – at all. The
R – Rating is absolutely appropriate for the content of this film… and not just
because of the poop.
Rotten Tomatoes Critic
Score – 53%
Rotten Tomatoes Audience
Score – 69%
Metascore – 54%
Metacritic User Score – 5.2/10
IMDB Score – 6.3/10
Trust the Dice: Cat’s
Rating – 2.5/5
Movie Trailer:
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