Howling
With kids' movies like Harry Potter and the
Sorcerer's Stone and Monsters, Inc. all the
rage these days, it might seem surprising that
Walt Disney's Snow Dogs is opening this weekend
with comparatively little fanfare. But this movie is
nothing to brag about. I have seen television ads for
the film in recent weeks, but always the same, short
clip: talking sled dogs in lounge chairs on a tropical
beach. Even aside from one odd question raised by this
misleading ad -- the dogs in the movie don't talk,
except for a 30-second dream sequence -- the movie
itself raises this question of its star, Cuba Gooding,
Jr.: "Why, Cuba, why?"
Like most Disney films, Snow Dogs stresses
Important Themes About Life. Except that it's not
clear exactly what this movie is about, with
possibilities ranging from Family, Fatherhood, and
Motherhood to Race and Identity, to Love. The multiple
things going on here, though, make the movie confusing
and scattered rather than complex and exciting. It's a
little bit of an adventure, a little bit about rites
of passage, and a little bit of a love story, but none
of these is very compelling.
Most of all, this movie is bizarre. I couldn't make
this stuff up: Ted Brooks (Gooding) is a Miami dentist
who inherits a cabin and a pack of sled dogs in
Tolketna, Alaska. Never having been there, and being
curious about his "roots," he jets up to the great
white north to attend the reading of the will. The
(brief) complication is that he never knew he had been
adopted, by a dentist (from whom he supposedly
inherited his zeal for the profession) and his prim
wife (Nichelle Nichols).
Three's more. In Alaska, Ted meets a gruff Alaska
musher, Thunder Jack (James Coburn). At least Coburn
and Gooding have proven their acting skills; Nichols
has excelled mostly at portraying herself after her
stint as Uhura in the original Star Trek
television and movie series. One of the weirder
elements in the film is Sisqo, who plays Ted's
assistant in the dental office. Known to most of us as
a bleached-haired and soulfully sexy crooner (and as a
high school student in Get Over It), Sisqo does
his best here to counter all these characterizations.
For his role as Gooding's goofy sidekick Rupert,
Sisqo's hair is kind of orange-tipped. He doesn't sing
(that's left for Michael Bolton to do here), and he
tends to act like Eddie Murphy on one his less
inspired days. Also, he's kind of gay, if being light
on one's feet and loving to shop are indications. But
not too much, because this is the Wonderful World of
Disney.
The film was apparently "suggested" by a book: Gary
Paulsen's Winterdance: the Fine Madness of Running
the Iditarod. In this case, the term "suggested"
seems even broader than usual: apparently, someone
thought there should be a movie about sled dogs in
Alaska, a race, and some snow. It could have just as
easily been "suggested" by White Fang or the
infamous Jamaican bobsled team that debuted at the
1988 Winter Olympics (oh, wait, that movie -- Cool
Runnings -- has already been made and forgotten),
or a really weird dream someone had.
Alaska, as we know from the 1990s TV series
Northern Exposure, is peopled with many quirky,
toothless, dirty characters, and at least one hot
chick. As in fictitious the series' Cicely, the social
life of Snow Dogs's Tolketna (Talkeetna,
Alaska, is actually a real place) centers on the
smoky, divey bar. The barmaid, Barb (Joanna Bacalso),
is foxy, friendly, and can kick a little ass when
necessary. And, fortunately for Ted's love life, Barb
is not White. Not that Ted has anything against White
people -- it's just so rare to see on-screen
interracial romance. Bacalso, who is one of the bright
points of this movie, is decidedly beige here: not
Black, so she's visibly different from Gooding, but
also not White, so she's not too different.
Still, Ted's primary relationship in Alaska -- at
least until he tracks down his father -- is with his
mother's dogs. At first, he has a difficult time with
them. There is a small indication at the beginning of
the movie that Ted is less than animal-friendly, but
as his hostility is directed to a yappy,
overly-coiffed poodle in the Miami condo next door to
his, it's hard to blame him on this one count. The
dogs in Alaska are quite different, especially
macho-alpha dog Demon, the leader of the pack. The
dogs don't actually talk, but they do wink, grin, and
come up with a few other human-like expressions, all
by way of digital and animatronic enhancement. We're
left to wonder -- are they really communicating, or do
these scenes all take place in Ted's head? (Well, I
didn't wonder that much, because I really didn't
care.)
Snow Dogs's plot is predictable, the action
scenes are repetitive, and the love scenes are stilted
and strange: at one point, Ted and Barb snuggle up and
howl at the moon together. As Ted, Gooding is all
giggles and slapstick. I lost count of the number of
times he slipped on the ice or fell in the snow.
Perhaps the movie is working with the theory that if
you do a schtick a million times, it eventually
becomes funny. In this case, it really doesn't.
