Strays review: A gleefully obscene comedy about cute dogs with potty mouths

Expect those outraged parents who don’t read film-certification notes (or reviews) to be again yelling on phone-in shows about the latest imagined assault on childhood innocence. You got a bit of this at the time of Bad Santa. Josh Greenbaum’s gleefully obscene comedy concerning cute dogs with potty mouths seems likely to fill up more silly-season airtime.

To be fair, by awarding a 16 certificate, the Irish Film Classification Office has (for the moment) closed off opportunities for little Saibh or Reuben to encounter bad words they’d otherwise need to walk down any city street to hear. It feels as if the anthropomorphism has required animal acts that could, as part of a wildlife documentary, merrily screen on TV pre-watershed to be classed alongside the most lubricious human erotica. Or to put it another way, as the IFCO’s notes explain, “adult themes explored from a canine perspective”.

Anyway, it’s not a kids’ film. Not in the way Barbie isn’t a kids’ film. More in the way Porky’s II: The Next Day isn’t a kid’s film. Will Ferrell voices a Border terrier called Reggie who lives in awkward equilibrium with an onanistic stoner (Will Forte). After several feeble attempts to dump the creature, this Doug eventually drives across the state and abandons Reggie in a needle-strewn alley. There he makes friends with a sassy Boston terrier (Jamie Foxx), a good-natured Australian shepherd (Isla Fisher) and a neurotic great dane (Randall Park). They decide to light out for the territories and reunite stray dog with dope-addled owner.

So it’s essentially The Incredible Journey – every bit as sentimental, every bit as cutesy, every bit as at home to life lessons – with trowels of obscenity grouted into all available, ahem, cracks. The gang are travelling with a mind to biting Doug’s penis off. They hump everything that moves. The copulatory F-word is forever on their lips. It’s Sausage Party with dogs.

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It’s also not very good. An inconsistent internal logic denies the dogs understanding of human language while inviting them to discuss the meaning of “doggy style”. (Yes, in that sense.) Are we hearing an interpretation of their barking? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. And so on. None of this would matter if, one sharp parody of Marley & Me aside, the jokes were not so painfully unamusing. Too drippy and half-cocked to bother defending.