By Jonah Naplan

July 16, 2022

I really don’t know why I saw this movie.

It was my finest hour. There I sat, in a theater full of children, watching a movie about a dog named Hank, who, against all odds, becomes a samurai to protect the canine-prohibited village of Kakamucho, with the help of a former, grizzled samurai played by Samuel L. Jackson. Yes, you heard me correctly. No, there is nothing wrong with your eyes. No, you don’t need new reading glasses. Samuel L. Jackson plays the role of Jimbo, Hank’s mentor. The babies and small children in my theater, too, were so shocked by this casting choice that they frequently screamed and cried throughout the film’s duration. You haven’t lived a full life until you’ve experienced a movie like this.

In addition to Samuel L. Jackson, this animated film stars the likes of Michael Cera, Mel Brooks, Ricky Gervais, Djimon Hounsou, Gabriel Iglesias, George Takei, and Michelle Yeoh. These actors have a fairly wide range in the amount of time they spend on-screen, but that doesn’t matter. None of them should be in this movie, and instead they should have cast someone like Justin Bieber as Hank, and I dunno, Pauly Shore as Jimbo. And even then, the actors would be undeserving of this pathetic piece of entertainment. 

We as audience members have to simply ask ourselves, “What went wrong here?” I scratched my head, thinking about that question, during the entirety of this clunkily self-aware movie. Oddly enough, most of the film’s humor isn’t actually toilet-based. (Besides a spray-paint joke at the beginning and fiery farts towards the end). But its alternative isn’t all that great either. For some very strange reason, the movie has a flat wink at the camera about every five minutes. Sometimes even more often than that. It jokes about its own runtime, the title department, and the tropes of the genre. But the six-year-olds in my theater didn’t laugh at the humor behind those one-liners. I have no reason to think that they would understand them. The children only laughed when Hank smashed into a big rock, or when he got hit in the face with a nunchuck. All this movie is, is one dog, and many cats, running around and hitting each other with blunt objects. 

Making an average children’s movie based around that slapstick concept is bad enough. But it’s almost worse when it doesn’t do that, and instead tries to poke fun at the industry. I’m all for movies that think outside the box, and joke about their own existence. But why the heck is this movie one of the films to do so? I just don’t understand who this humor is for. The parents who got dragged along? God no. The parents are already pulling out their phones, or just staring absentmindedly at the screen, thinking about the bills they’re gonna have to pay when they get home.

A film like this shouldn’t really have high aspirations. And I’m not saying that to be discouraging. When I give a grade to a movie, I’m examining it based on how good the movie is at being what its trailer promised. “Paws of Fury: The Legend of Hank” promised to be a harmless kids movie, and isn’t much good at even being that. This is just another film that treats its audience like idiots. It over-explains practically everything, and tries to have deep undertones about racism. A key plotline is that dogs are not allowed in the village in which Hank is trying to protect. It’s modern-day segregation as portrayed in a kids movie. But none of it feels particularly resonant. I don’t understand why this kind of a movie can’t just be light enough entertainment to pass an afternoon. Instead, it tells a dull tale of a village overshadowed by a larger civilization. 

A woman and her two young boys, probably kindergarteners, I would guess, were sitting next to me during the movie, and I noticed that the two boys were getting so restless, that they stood up and started complaining to their mom about something that I couldn’t make out. Either way, it was more entertaining trying to decipher what these children were saying than it was watching the movie right in front of me.