The Secret Life of Pets

So I finished Injustice 2 and I'm trying to write something that is both a review for that game as well as do my spoilers rant for Wonder Woman, but that is turning into a whole thing about the DCEU and there are a lot of thoughts that I unfortunately just don't have a lot of time to map out and make a full rant of yet. I'm hoping those posts will be coming out soon. But for now, I just wanted to finish a movie I hadn't seen before and write a simple review. And that's why I took a little bit of a detour and watched The Secret Life of Pets.

When this trailer dropped, people lost their flipping minds.

And I get it, it's a really cute trailer that asks the question what our pets do during the day when we're not around. I think everybody was thinking something in the realm of Toy Story where the animals are off doing their own thing and then come back and we wonder what they did because we as humans don't know that they're talking in english to one another and going on crazy adventures. It seemed like a cute romp.

So I think the hype for this movie was huge. And the result?

The Secret Life of Pets follows the story of a little dog named Max (voiced by Louis CK). He absolutely adores his owner Katie (voiced by Ellie Kemper) and can't imagine his life without her. One day Katie brings home another dog named Duke (voiced by Eric Stonestreet). And of course, Max has a rough introduction to the large, brown, shaggy, dog.

The next day, after a series of unfortunate circumstances, the two end up out of the house, without identification, and lost. It's basically the plot of both Toy Story and Toy Story 2... except with dogs instead of toys. Max and Duke obviously don't like each other but they have to work together to get home to Katie before she comes home and realizes they are missing.

Along the way they have to avoid the dog catchers, dodge New York traffic, and allude a murderous bunny (voiced by Kevin Hart) and his band of abandoned animals.

And yeah I need to talk about Kevin Hart because this was one of the appeals of the movie besides the trailer. Kevin Hart voicing a cute bunny rabbit who ends up being this savage gang leader.

Sadly its a lot funnier as a concept than in execution.

Kevin Hart is a very funny comedian. Even in his movies that I didn't think were very good like Get Hard I still enjoyed Kevin Hart and had a lot of laughs by his performance. I don't know how much voice acting he's done and if it's him or the script, but this outing for Hart just wasn't his strongest. There were still a couple moments where I thought he was really funny, but a lot of his lines were less funny and more banking on the hope that you've seen Kevin Hart before and his Kevin Hartisms would carry the performance. I don't know if any of these lines were improvised, but if they were I'm a little worried for Kevin Hart's improvisational skills.

But at least Kevin Hart's character had a little bit of just that, character. The other half of this movie when it wasn't Max and Duke running away from being murdered by a rabbit was this entirely pointless group of pets.

So at a certain point in the movie, a neighbor dog of Max's named Gidget (voiced by Jenny Slate) decides that she is suddenly in love with Max and it is her mission to go off and find Max no matter what the obstacle. On her little side mission that she goes on, you've got a whole cast of characters that you really won't remember but they are voiced by a bunch of famous people. There's a cat voiced by Lake Bell, a Weiner dog voiced by Hannibal Burress, a pug voiced by Bobby Moynihan, a hamster voiced by Chris Renaud, a red tailed hawk voiced by Albert Brooks, and a paralyzed dog voiced by Dana Carvey.

All these characters a pretty indistinguishable and while they were all different animals and brought their own gags and little in-jokes about pets you might have, they really don't add anything to the plot at all. This could have been Gidget going on this adventure with red tailed hawk and that would have been a totally serviceable movie, you didn't need all these pointless characters.

Like Albert Brooks wasn't even the best character nor was he really even that funny, but I feel like they could have built a cool little friendship between him and Jenny Slate's character and since both of them are half way decent voice actors, that would have worked better than the fellowship of the ringworm that we had going here.

Are there any good things about the film? I feel like I've been tearing it apart.

Well in case you haven't already picked up on it, I do think the voice cast was pretty good. You had a couple of voice actors where it was very hard to distinguish the character from the voice. Kevin Hart obviously fell into that category as well as Louis CK. But it's a pretty good cast considering.

I will also say that they do knock down the animal behavior gags pretty well. The humor that came from this movie was really the stuff you saw in the trailer, animals acting like animals even though they interact and talk normally.

When they were animating the Lion King, it's famously known that they brought lions into the studios to study how they interact. I imagine that the animators sat and just watched their dogs while doing the animation and it's really well done.

It's the little details that I actually enjoyed more than the blatant gags they pull off for laughs in this film. The little details I'm talking about is when you have moments where Max is afraid or being threatened, his tail goes in between his legs and he has a submissive stance. While the animation is far from realistic on purpose, all the animals are very well animated and that's saying something as animation is definitely not a strong suit of mine and it has to be really good for me to notice something like that.

Overall, The Secret Life of Pets is cute. It's not gonna be the masterpiece movie that you thought it was going to be when you saw that trailer. Which is a shame because I think this really had the subject material and the potential to be a film that would match the quality of a Pixar film and I can't help but think that if Pixar had been behind this movie, it would have been a lot better. As it is, the movie is pretty weak in the story and the humor. It's really just a hodgepodge of gags about your pets accompanied by pretty good animation and a lot of AWWWWW moments. It's a movie about your pets, did you really think that wasn't going to happen in this movie. If you have young kids or are a young kid at heart that doesn't need a lot to be entertained, you'll find a couple of laughs and some AWWWWW moments in The Secret Life of Pets. But as a movie, you're gonna be lacking a little bit by the end.

But those are my thoughts on The Secret Life of Pets. Have you seen it? What did you think about it? Comment and Discuss below! You can also send me your thoughts on Twitter @cmhaugen24 as well as send me your requests for films I should review in the future. If you follow me on Twitter, you can get updates on future movie news and reviews coming out of this blog as well as occasional live tweeting sessions when I'm watching these movies.

I'll leave you with this. C'mon, there's a killer rabbit in this movie, you have to pull out the Monty Python. Enjoy!