If dogs could talk, what would they say? Would they communicate their most rudimentary desires, or would they comment insightfully on Joan Didion's latest essay on the tragicomic vicissitudes of the American political system? In Good Boy!, a slimmed-down Matthew Broderick squeezes into the role of a snooty alien border terrier who comes to Earth expecting something closer to the latter, except with Didion enslaved by his canine compatriots. But because Good Boy!, a tool of oppression disguised as a "comedy for the entire family," was made by humans, the terrier becomes an unwitting pawn in a propaganda film that's every bit as insidious as 2001's neo-fascist, anti-feline dirge Cats & Dogs. In a classic bait-and-switch, writer Zeke Richardson and director John Hoffman flatter dogs by pretending they're super-intelligent, articulate beings from Sirius (the Dog Star, naturally), sent to Earth to colonize and rule the planet. Then, they undermine their characters' dignity by giving them incredibly humiliating things to say. Instead of speaking like the canine Algonquin Round Table, the poor mutts can only talk about sniffing butts, barking at hydrants, and which one of them has the runs. When an exasperated Broderick tries to rally them with the badly worded plea, "Your pride and honor should burst forth," he just gets a loud, solitary fart in response. These sorts of hijinks are manna for the audience's stupidest children, but the underlying goal of Good Boy! is to keep dogs firmly noosed to their leashes, as "friends" to humans forever. For example, they're supposed to love Liam Aiken, that horrible little brat from Stepmom, who stars as an overeager misfit whose parents (Saturday Night Live alums Kevin Nealon and Molly Shannon) promised him a dog if he walked the neighborhood pooches for three months. When it comes time for him to rescue one from the pound, he chooses Broderick, not knowing that the aloof terrier is an "interplanetary scout" sent to Earth to evaluate how the space dogs' colonization plans are working out. But after Broderick gathers his local minions (voiced by Delta Burke, Donald Faison, Carl Reiner, Brittany Murphy, and, in her greatest performance to date, Vanessa Redgrave), he's disheartened to find that they've all become subservient pets. Good Boy! includes a few half-hearted ironies about how people are really serving dogs, not the other way around, but even those gags are cribbed from a retired Seinfeld routine about how aliens might perceive pooper-scooping humans as the inferior species. If any future space dogs are looking for evidence of human inferiority, they could do worse than watching this movie.