Ironically, the star of the aggressively silly Dog Man is its cat villain

In a movie about a supercop who’s half man, half dog, and all good boy, Pete Davidson walks away with the show as easily as his villainous character Petey breaks out of cat prison. Dog Man is a spin-off of a spin-off, the second movie in the Captain Underpants series, itself an adaptation of Dav Pilkey’s graphic novels; after concluding his breakout series in 2015, Pilkey kicked off his next project, Dog Man, the following year. Nearly a decade later, and now that story hits the big screen. Pilkey is nothing if not enterprising.

But there’s something at the heart of Dog Man, beneath the aggressive franchising and twice as aggressive silliness—something that Davidson appears to identify with as Garfield’s ne’er-do-well kin. Movies like this, marketed to and made for theaters packed with gleeful kids, tend not to confront the worst of life; put aside the glory days of Pixar, and most contemporary CGI-animated family films wrap up their plots with bows, in an avalanche of feel-good balm to soothe residual prickles felt by such storytelling necessities as “stakes” and “tension.” Dog Man doesn’t do that. It acknowledges those bad feelings. It lets them stick around, even as the characters responsible for them piss off out of frame, never to be heard from again or given their comeuppance.

But describing Dog Man as a hard-hitting drama about how childhood neglect produces unruly adults would sell just as much a lie to the movie’s chief demographic as assuring them, falsely, that everything always turns out for the best. Dog Man is a sugar rush. If Emmet Brickowski ever made a movie, it would have the same energy as this one, where the fourth wall is broken so many times you’d have to buy out Home Depot’s stock of joint compound to patch it, any plot development is possible (no matter how implausible), and all science is mad science.

Dog Man opens with Petey on the run in the city, with Officer Knight (Hastings) and his K-9, Greg (also Hastings), in hot pursuit, ending in the duo eating an explosion that destroys Greg’s body, but not his head, and Officer Knight’s head, but not his body. The doctors operating on them in the ER have a brilliant solution: a hybrid experiment, marking the birth of Dog Man, the greatest cop to wear the badge. 

Petey doesn’t like this turn of events. Neither do the Chief (Lil Rel Howery), who feels shunted off the media’s attention by Dog Man’s accomplishments, hampering his crush on news reporter Sarah Hatoff (Isla Fisher); the Mayor (Cheri Oteri); or Officer Knight’s girlfriend, who unceremoniously sells their house and moves the minute he’s out of the hospital. Through all of this, Petey tries his hardest to do evil, setting Dog Man up as a sequence of vignettes and character beats, where Hastings pays off gags with pell-mell delight and seeds his emotional arcs, as well as what ultimately blossoms into a plot that hinges on a psychotic telekinetic fish. 

Catching each joke the film tells is a Herculean feat given the velocity at which they’re told, and the dots Hastings has to connect to get from “episodic structure” to “climactic urban destruction” are various enough that there’s no point keeping track of them. So it falls to those emotional arcs, and Petey most of all, to give Dog Man grounding, and the audience a breather. Petey clones himself, thinking that the key to defeating Dog Man is outnumbering him, but what he ends up with is Li’l Petey (Lucas Hopkins), a kitten, and as far as Petey is concerned, a nuisance; Hastings, on the other hand, sees Li’l Petey as a foil to Petey, and a window for empathy for the latter. In that dynamic, Davidson—who’s having the time of his life vocalizing Dog Man’s foundational wackiness—glows. 

He’s voice acted before, in films like Marmaduke and Transformers: Rise Of The Beasts, but Davidson’s work in Dog Man is different. The actor and the part gel terrifically, which makes an unsurprising amount of sense; in his Audible Questionnaire from 2022, Davidson talks about how much he enjoys watching characters experience transformative change. But in a children’s film whose style reads like a hybrid of stop-motion and computer animation, it does come as a surprise that the rough-around-the-edges comic actor should leave the strongest lasting impression.

Director: Peter Hastings
Writer: Peter Hastings 
Starring: Peter Hastings, Pete Davidson, Lil Rel Howery, Lucas Hopkins, Isla Fisher, Ricky Gervais, Stephen Root, Billy Boyd, Poppy Liu
Release Date: January 31, 2025