Call of the Wild
I can’t believe a CGI dog is really the main character in a 90 minute feature film. The killer dog that murders a greedy rich prospector in the big climax, just chucks him into a burning log cabin. That’s wild all right.
Buck, the giant Saint Bernard (?), runs around a small California town, bumping into things violently, and being an all around nuisance. This being the time of the Klondike Gold Rush, he is dognapped and sold into Alaska.
Eventually, he is sold into a mail delivery sled team, manned by Arsène Lupin and Camina Drummer. The lead dog is a tyrant Husky with a German name, so he fight with him and wins the title of leader of the free world, I mean, head sled dog.
But alas, the Doggy Express doesn’t make financial sense in the time of telegraphs, so the dogs are sold, and the mail people go back home. Some rich prospector with a English accent buys the team, fill their sled with crap, and run them to the limit of their strength. The rest of the team disbands and probably dies in the frozen river, but Buck is rescued by Deckard, drinking himself to death after his son died.
After being harassed by the same rich prospector, they go on a field trip to the deep forest, where they chill in some Arcadian fantasy, pan for gold and find a shitload of them in the river. Turns out the prospector’s tale was bona fide, and Deckard really leapfrogged him and gold and kept the gold.
Buck explores the forest and find a female timber wolf he fancies, they spend a lot of time in secluded places, and start licking each other suggestively. Deckard has enough gold for a lifetime of groceries, so he plans to go back home. Buck can stay and lead the wolfpack.
In the nick of time, the rich prospector finds Deckard and tries to kill him, but Buck intervenes, throwing that Englishman into a burning log cabin. He’s the wolf leader now, even the grizzlies respect him.
This is truly bizarre, it’s not like The Lion King where the lions are ersatz human kings, the dogs are somewhat anthropomorphised, but there are still actual humans. Buck and apparently all the other dogs understand spoken English and many people treat them like racially diverse humans.
All people are basically supporting characters. Harrison Ford appears only in the last 30 minutes (plus a cameo at the start), Cara Gee and Omar Sy are the fake protagonists at the start, but they drop out of the film unceremoniously, the dog was the mastermind all along.
This should be remade in gritty realist fashion with real animals, like Roar, or The Island of Dr. Moreau. Or go the other way around to Over The Edge. As is, it’s a nothingburger.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.