After filming the first film, of course, the dog died, as dogs are wont to do; but that didn't stop Disney from finding other stand-in Golden Retrievers (and lousy puppetry when the sport of the day required it) to create a series of sequels. As it turns out, Buddy was also capable of playing American football, European football, baseball, and most embarrassingly of all, girls' beach volleyball, which also neglects to have a rule against players being dudes. Apparently, sales were slowing by this point, or maybe they were just running out of sports Americans would recognize - hockey's more the realm of those ultra-foreign Canadians, after all - but, whatever the reason, the important producer-type people realised that a very clever revamp was needed to keep the series afloat. And that brings us to Air Buddies, a not-so-very-clever revamp, which bet a lot on the basic concept that everybody likes puppies, everybody likes dialogue, and as such, everybody LOOOOOOOVES it when puppies have dialogue, especially professional film critics. Plopping this disc into the delicate technological underbelly of my DVD player, I found myself pretending to wonder whether this could actually restore the series to its fondly remembered heyday that I'm pretending existed at some point. Hopefully you'll pretend to wonder that, too, so I won't feel quite so silly answering it. Please?
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| I know Golden Retrievers are sporting dogs, but this is ridiculous! |
Via the narration of a depressingly old Don Knotts as Deputy Sniffer, a bloodhound whose name is perhaps a bit too - WAIT FOR IT - on the nose, we learn that Buddy, the super-macho über-hunk of the ladies' beach volleyball world, met a sexy lady golden retriever named Molly (and not Holly, because Robert Vince doesn't get puns), and together, they made sweet sweet love that resulted in terrible terrible children, who have apparently each inherited one-fifth of their papa's impressive range of sports talents. I think the kids actually debuted in the last main-series Air Bud film, but I don't think they had magickal sporting abilities there, and they DEFINITELY couldn't talk. Anyway, for your benefit, let's quickly run through the list of Buddies, and their defining characteristics, so you'll be able to keep track of this film's wide assortment of incredibly deep, fleshed out characters:
- There's football-loving Budderball, who's slightly bigger than the other puppies, so of course he likes to eat literally everything, and then fart a lot, as all "fat" people do, because they are literally the worst.
- There's B-Dawg, whose existence results in Don Knotts being forced to utter the phrase "B-ballin' homedoggy who the kids say is all about the bling-bling", though he still sells this sort of lingo better than B-Dawg's actual voice actor, Skyler Gisondo. (Yes, Skyler Gisondo was upstaged at the art of young person slang by a man whose primary entertainment characteristic by this point was being old, and slow, and awkward. It really was just so terribly embarrassing for all.)
- There's baseball enthusiast Buddha, who's all laid back, chilled out, and....well, apparently some sort of Buddhist. Question: Did the Framm family name him after the religion they instinctively knew he'd end up following, or did he take up Buddhism because he simply felt like his punny name gave him literally no other choice?
- There's ladies' beach volleyballer Mudbud, a guy who just enjoys rolling around in the mud and getting generally dirty, a trait which sets him apart from literally every other puppy in existence. He also likes saying "dude" a lot, because he's EDGY, dude.
- And finally, there's Rosebud, whose defining character trait is, um, that she's a girl. (Speaking of girls, why are none of the puppies named after Molly? Do their owners really hate her THAT MUCH?)
Whereas their father used his athletic talents for rulebook-sodomizing good, the Buddies, being terrible by virtue of being puppies, have an unwitting tendency towards using them for evil. Even something as adorable as showing off their unconvincing puppy athleticism with balls of yarn, like kitties - Buddha even pulls a tiny little baseball bat out of nowhere for this scene - has a puppy-like dark side, as the resulting yarn carnage (yarnage?) ties up their sleeping dogsitter, as played by professional old British lady Jane Carr, in her kinkiest role yet. Richard Karn (as the head of the Framm household) gets home, sees this, takes a second to make a really sad attempt at a clumsy fat guy pratfall, and finally decides it's time to get rid of them. Apparently, the Buddies are famous enough that this requires a lengthy application process. Would any of you guys put up with all this red tape just to adopt a puppy? I wouldn't, but I guess my crappy boring small town isn't as crappy-boring-small-town-tastic as Fernfield. But it doesn't matter anyway, because the Buddies band together to run away, as a group, instead of being split up. Well, there's a decision that almost certainly won't set off a film-length chain reaction of family-friendly misfortune!
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| Richard Karn is, of course, every bit as exasperated with this puppy nonsense as we are. |
Meanwhile, we meet Bartleby Livingstone, a spoiled rich brat with the sort of name only a spoiled rich brat could tolerate. Bartleby has come to the conclusion that it's no longer impressive to own endangered jungle cat species, but it would be just bitchin' to own "the Air Bud". Assigned to the case are some of the worst henchmen ever: one of them old and ugly, the other pretty, because he's apparently played by a male model. No, really. He is. When this dynamic duo sees Buddy and Molly at the same time, they seem stymied that there's actually more than one Golden Retriever in existence. When they cross paths with the Buddies, they seem positively baffled by the basic concept of puppies. ("Those dogs, they've shrunk!", exclaims Pretty Henchman.) When they finally successfully capture Budderball, they require the use of a fishing pole to do so, as though simply walking up to a puppy and grabbing it is an absurd Herculean task that no mere mortal could possibly hope to accomplish. In the end, though, they manage to successfully use the puppies as bait to capture "the Air Bud" and his "mistress". And thus, the plot hurtles off into The Only Possible Direction: the Buddies set out to rescue their parents, while the Henchmen are ordered to head out and recapture the puppies as well. Did I mention that their direct superior is some sort of homosexual pirate? That's the only possible way to explain the eyepatch and frilly purple suit.
To reiterate: we have an eccentric rich person with a ridiculous name ordering two bumbling underlings to round up purebred puppies. If you're thinking that sounds awfully familiar, rest assured that the film itself agrees with you, by having 101 Dalmatians play during a scene set in a drive-in theater. The original animated classic, I mean, not the one with Hugh Laurie. In a truly inspirational devotion to his chosen profession, Pretty Henchman regards viewing the film as "research". Of course, there are fundamental differences between that film and this one. I don't recall 101 Dalmatians featuring jokes about dog flatulence, for instance. And then there's the fact that Cruella de Vil was actually sort of a scary villain, by virtue of being both dangerously insane, and a reanimated skeleton from the depths of hell. Whereas the dog-related hijinx in this film are set in motion because of, um, a fat kid in a bowtie. A BOWTIE! One of those damnable bolo ties everyone in this damnable state wears would be more intimidating than a bowtie! Stupid stupid stupid!
...I'm sorry for hurting your feelings, Air Buddies. To be fair, though, you brought up the comparison to a classic animated film first. Incidentally, the projection room in the theater also features posters for Old Yeller and the original The Incredible Journey, a weirdly retro shout-out that also seems to imply that Fernfield has some sort of statute in place that only allows theaters to screen Disney's dog-themed movies from the late 50's and early 60's. (I'd hate to see what passes for an adults-only XXX theater in this town.) Then again, this is a film where roving gangs of puppy enthusiast bikers also exist, and there's no rules in any book against dogs playing any sport at all, so let's just accept the fact that everyone in Fernfield has an unnatural obsessive lust for canines and just move on, shall we?
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| Okay, to be fair, even these people think it's a big buzzkill to find a puppy in their "Super Jumbo Family Size Tub of Popcorn". Even if it's a famous puppy! |
While these wacky puppy hijinx ensue, Buddy (now also given a voice, the rather unfitting Tom Everett Scott) spends the majority of the movie simply trying to dig out of Li'l Livingstone's secret underground lair. What a rather big fall from grace for the former star of this series of moderately successful family sports comedies! A warning for any potential villain-types out there: if the walls of your secret underground lair are just dirt, let alone dirt that's loose enough for dogs to dig through, it's probably really quite unsafe to be down there. The ground will cave in, and you'll be killed, and nobody will even come to your evil funeral.
Still, being reduced spending the entire middle portion of this film digging a hole is probably more dignified than the fate that befalls the human actors comprising the Framm family (Frammily?), who find themselves playing the autopilotastic "useless worrying family" scenes that are apparently mandatory in movies like this, and Home Alone, and Homeward Bound, and so on. Y'know what I mean. Those scenes where they speak a few throwaway lines about hoping the situation gets worked out soon, perform some vaguely emotion-like manoeuvring, and make absolutely sure they hold back on doing anything that could theoretically intrude on the actual plot, with all its comparatively amusing hijinx, until the time is right. Sure, the youngest kid and his token black friend head out on a search with their small-town sheriff, who is predictably an old white-haired Southern hick, which comes close to being something that could be helpful. Alas, though, all that comes of this is Deputy Sniffer leading the group to a skunk, where of course everyone gets sprayed; this is an über-classy parallel to the scene that directly follows it, wherein Budderball escapes the grasp of the idiot dognappers by harnessing the awesome power of canine flatulence. Because he's the fat one, remember.
Actually, I'm pretty sure EVERY role in this film is undesirable, paycheck aside. Two of the most embarrassing roles come when the Buddies' less-than-incredible journey takes them to a farm. Wallace Shawn - a really smart guy who knows a lot of shit, but how to say know isn't one of them - provides the voice of a goat named - WAIT FOR IT - Billy! Debra Jo Rupp portrays a mammal of the porcine persuasion who speaks - WAIT FOR IT - Pig Latin! Yes, this is a film that doesn't skimp on the forced bargain-bin punnery. The Buddies themselves are some of the worst offenders, sprinkling their dialogue with generally intolerable groaners, at least half of which exist solely to remind you which puppy's supposed to have which character quirk. Forgotten that Buddha's supposed to be a Buddhist, for example? He'll dredge up a choice one-liner about inner peace or whatever to jog your memory. Better yet, he'll deliver with the deep, multi-layered cadence of a kid reading a bad joke off a script he's just now seeing, for the first time ever. Taking the crown for most all-around awkward pun, though, is Rosebud. In the aforementioned theater scene, she gets trapped in a whirling cotton candy machine, and shouts, "It's like a hurricandy in here!" Abigail Breslin's performance utter fails to sell the idea that this is something that anyone anywhere in the omniverse might actually say, though I honestly can't imagine any performance that COULD sell something like that. The awkward use of the indefinite article certainly doesn't help things along, at all!
Of course, it should come as no surprise to anyone that Ugly Henchman and Pretty Henchman, being evil, are too stupid to actually be able to form puns. So, they make up for this by overindulging in another lowbrow artform: the fine art of taunting puppies. Of course, given that Air Buddies exists in one of those film universes where animals can only talk to other animals, with the humans completely unable to understand them, this seems more like a symptom of some sort of psychosis than anything. Perhaps they should see a henchpsychiatrist...
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| This picture contains a mixture of puppies and piglets. Can you tell which is which? If you said "yes", congratulations - you're smarter than the Super Henchman Bros.! |
Eventually, after wandering blindly through the countryside for, like, a day or two, the Buddies finally come across the vineyard where the villains' secret lair is hidden, thanks in part to a useful tip from Michael Clarke Duncan, playing the wolf equivalent of the Magical Negro trope. Now, puppies aren't really that fast, so I guess this indicates that the big bad secret lair is actually located even closer to Fernfield than the map earlier in the movie implies. Now, I know you guys might have mixed feelings about the continuing corporatization of America, but I, for one, am absolutely THRILLED that organizations like McDonald's Corporation, Wal-Mart Stores Incorporated, and The Big Bad Villain Secret Underground Lair Company are constantly striving to make their services available to those living in increasingly rural areas. It's even conveniently located right underneath a charming country winery. What a sheer delight!
At about the same time, Deputy Sniffer realises that getting sprayed by that skunk restored his failing sense of smell. This is possible, by the same movie logic that says cases of amnesia caused by smashing one's head against something can be cured by smashing one's head against something else. Go ahead, give it a try! If you've got a camera rolling, it'll work. Anyway, now that Sniffer can use his sniffer again, he can track down the missing dogs, though he's old, and he can't do it alone, so he recruits some children to do his bidding. Namely, he opts to drag the youngest Framm kid and his token black friend along on his rogue escapade. Surely they wouldn't let a HUMAN deputy get away with this sort of reckless child endangerment, but a DOG can? Fucking double standards...
As it turns out, though, Buddy and Molly simply didn't need their kids' help, because they were perfectly capable of digging their way out of the secret underground lair, uninterestingly enough. In fact, if their puppies HADN'T followed them, this plot would be resolved by now; but they did, and the lameness marches on. The henchmen's direct superior, the aforementioned (butt) pirate, discovers the adults' escape, but is saved from the horrible prospect of embarrassment in front of Bartleby and his Bowtie of Doom and Eternity, when the Buddies excitedly hurl themselves down the same hole their parents just used to escape, because....I dunno. Maybe the Henchman Bros' stupidity wore off on them after a rather short film's worth of pursuit. Sigh.
With the scenario reversed, the parents free but their puppies now captured, it's clearly time for the BIG EXCITING ACTION CLIMAX - and boy, do they totally (not) go all out for the occasion! There's a daring escape from an unlocked limousine with one of the windows rolled down! There's a decidedly ill-conceived barrel storage theme that inevitably fails, leading to low-speed low-intensity low-rent Donkey Kongery! There's even Budderball getting super-drunk, in a kids' movie, and farting in a giant vat of wine! Can you think of anything that could possibly be more exciting, even slightly? I submit that you cannot!
In the end, though, we learn that Bartleby was only doing this because he wanted a fwiend, which apparently makes everything he and his employees have ever done forgiveable. As such, he's ultimately allowed to adopt one of the puppies anyway, while the others are adopted by other families, as originally planned. In the touching final scene of this heart-warming tale, the Buddies, now in their respective new homes, are handling this new living situation just fine, because they're still able to communicate with each other, and their parents, from across town, via howling. And when I say "howling", you ought to know that I don't mean actual canine howling, but rather, they actually forced the voice cast to engage in imitation howling themselves. Go on, Skyler Gisondo, show off your inner beast! Alas, if only they'd managed to get Don Knotts in on this howling business as well, his legacy would've truly been complete...
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| And clearly we can trust young Bartleby with the huge responsibility of pet ownership, as evidenced by his habit of employing fur coat aficionados. |
Coming out of this movie, a few questions spring to mind. How would this plot have been any different had these puppies not been gifted in the sporty arts? Wasn't Abigail Breslin once a relatively respectable child actress? Can any film that deems it necessary to include clouds of green CGI gas to accompany its puppy flatulence jokes ever really be deemed a worthwhile use of DVD real estate? And, well, just who was this film meant for? Though we see a few seconds of footage of the original Air Bud in the montage accompanying Knotty Dog's opening spiel, the rest of the movie eagerly tries to forget that, at one point, this franchise was....well, let's not lie through our teeth and say it was even remotely GOOD or anything, but it was at least tolerable, in the "harmless family film that Roger Ebert sometimes awards three stars to, for no reason other than just being in a good mood that day" sense. Whereas, y'know, you could bet the farm that he wouldn't give THIS movie three stars even if he was baked out of his gourd and having the best goddamn day of his Ebertastic life.
Presumably, anyone else who saw the original would also react with bemusement, at the very least, if not outright violent disgust. No, this isn't for anyone who remembers the original, fondly or otherwise. The level of writing here, what with hilarious Skyler Gisondo one-liners about pooper scoopers and all, is clearly aimed at the ever-important 6-to-8-year-old demographic. Y'know, that age group where everything aimed at you these days has to break out a couple flatulence jokes to help you swallow its important moral about the importance of friends, family, or even the blatantly unhealthy synonymization of the two, as seen in this film. In other words, this is a film that is perfectly content to exist in that pocket where it succeeds not on the grounds of actually being entertaining - the jokes play out in that standard low-level family comedy way, where the jokes are so awkward and mechanical that they don't even fully register as jokes - but rather, simply because it's uncontroversial enough for conservative parents to feel okay buying for their children, without that pesky risk of anything within potentially causing independent thought. Yes, one of the puppies is a Buddhist; but he expresses his wacky exotic un-Christian system of beliefs exclusively through puns, so presumably they'll give it a pass.
This bland mediocrity is what makes it impossible for me, in good conscience, to recommend to anyone. The occasional mild cuteness of some of the seventh-rate punnery is offset by such a pervasive sense of bland aimlessness that I can't say I'd ever be eager to watch it again just to enjoy those rare moments of choice embarrassment. This film inexplicably revitalized the franchise, of course, and the more recent entries in the endless cavalcade of Buddies films look fundamentally more promising, in the sense that they have more blatant clusterfuck potential, which is the best they could possibly hope for. Alas, Air Buddies itself is just too basic and sterile to even vaguely approach gleeful clusterfuck territory, and so, on Jesse's Patented Scale of Awfulness, I'm afraid it earns a middling, and very disappointing....
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| THREE DEEPLY DEPRESSED CARTOON PUPPIES OUT OF FIVE*! |
TYPICAL AIR BUDDIES QUOTE OF THE DAY (sponsored by Kellogg's!):
"I'm meditating. Absorbing positive energy." "I'd positively like to absorb a Pop-Tart!" - Buddha (Dominic Scott Kay) and Budderball (Josh Flitter)
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