The hero of the animated feature “Dog Man” has his origin in a twisted bit of business that wouldn’t be out of place in “RoboCop”: A bomb injures a policeman named Officer Knight and his canine partner, Greg. To make the best of the organs that are still working, the medical team sews the dog’s head onto his human buddy’s body. Dog Man, as he is now known, returns home to an abandoned house. His girlfriend has left him for a new guy — and a new dog.
Nothing that follows in “Dog Man” is nearly as grim as that setup might suggest, and frankly neither is that setup, which traffics in the kind of body-twisting absurdism that will be familiar to any devotee of Wile E. Coyote cartoons. Nevertheless, that kickoff offers a foretaste of the film’s demented sense of humor, derived from the wildly successful graphic novel series of the same name by Dav Pilkey, the author of “Captain Underpants.”
In this screen adaptation, written and directed by Peter Hastings, jokes fly with the bouncy randomness of Dog Man’s favorite tennis ball, and there are so many that a fair number of them would land even if they weren’t pretty good. Mostly, it’s a visual pleasure: The computer renderings have just enough texture, and the movements enough jittery tactility, to give the film a handmade feel. The splashy color palette keeps the eye engaged.
The plot involves the seemingly intractable rivalry between Dog Man (voiced by Hastings, but he speaks in barks) and Petey (Pete Davidson), “the world’s most evilest cat,” who — in a montage explicitly labeled a montage — breaks out of prison each time Dog Man arrests him. An Australian-accented reporter (Isla Fisher) provides running commentary on Dog Man’s derring-do. A police chief (Lil Rel Howery) is sympathetic to his efforts, but the mayor (Cheri Oteri) isn’t.
The pop-culture shout-outs (Dog Man howling along to Hank Williams) and bids to seem current (Petey’s henchgirl saying “bee-tee-dubs”) are gratifyingly few. It’s hard to hate a film in which a cloning machine is an ordinary e-commerce purchase, a robotic contraption has the name 80-HD (say it aloud) or a hotline exists specifically to tell callers that life’s not fair. Even the running gag of giving buildings on-the-nose names (“Petey’s Secret Lab” “Abandoned Expendable Warehouse”), which should get old, doesn’t overstay its welcome: A movie with a genuine comic-book sensibility ought to have some love for onscreen text.
Dog Man
Rated: PG. Running time: 1 hour 29 minutes. In theaters.
