Strays Review: This Uninspired Comedy Will Make You Wish You Could Play Dead

On paper, the new comedy Strays has an impressive pedigree. It stars the voice talents of Will Ferrell and Jamie Foxx, as well as Will Forte in a significant role, with all three being the stars of various fan-favorite and hilarious projects. Strays was directed by Josh Greenbaum, who directed the endearing and absurd Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar, while it was written by Dan Perrault, creator of Netflix’s American Vandal. It was even produced by Phil Lord and Chris Miller, who managed to exceed all expectations with their work on projects like the 21 Jump Street movies, multiple LEGO movies, and the TV series The Afterparty and Clone High. Despite everything being stacked in its favor, Strays ends up being unoriginal, uninspired, and, worst of all, unfunny.

The deadbeat Doug (Forte) tries his best to get rid of his scruffy dog Reggie (Ferrell), who he only kept from a past relationship out of spite. When he finally drops Reggie far enough away from home, Reggie encounters stray dogs Bug (Foxx), Hunter (voiced by Randall Park), and Maggie (voiced by Isla Fisher), who teach him all the great things about not having an owner. While he initially had a love for Doug, despite the neglect and abuse, his newfound pals ignite a new path for him in life: to get back home to bite off Doug’s penis. 

In the opening five minutes of Strays, we see Doug shouting all manner of foul-mouthed obscenities at his dog, doing bong rips, sitting on the toilet, and being interrupted by Reggie while he’s attempting to masturbate. These first five minutes also set the stage for the level of humor and creativity that audiences will be forced to endure over the film’s 93-minute run time. If this type of humor excites you, then Strays will surely be a delight, but if you were hoping for any circumvention of expectation like anything you’ve seen from any of the creatives involved in the film, you won’t be granted the respite from the barrage of humping and poop jokes.

The actors behind Strays are the strongest components of the project, since hearing funny people delivering silly lines of dialogue from adorable animals is a relatively fool-proof cinematic decision, which can explain virtually every animated comedy intended for all ages from the last few decades. Even Forte offers glimpses of delight, as he has proven throughout his entire career how much fun it is to watch him embrace his outlandishness. Given the history of movies featuring animals talking, the blend of live-action canines and CG-created mouth movements in Strays, along with the voice talents, show how far we’ve come in the genre of talking-animal movies.

It’s hard to really single out the most glaring issue that makes Strays so unenjoyable, other than the entire concept and the jokes and sequences it inspires. While Forte’s Doug is understandably meant to be off-putting, anyone with even a modicum of empathy towards animals that are neglected and abandoned by terrible owners will find little to enjoy in how the premise is introduced. Given how, just earlier this year, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 struck impressive emotional highs with its themes of animal abuse and experimentation, and how there are entire websites devoted to telling audiences ahead of time if any dogs are harmed in a movie, starting off Strays with an attempt to make animal neglect funny just taints the entire experience. Even had the story started further along into Reggie’s journey to welcome viewers into the experience and then delivered those flashbacks, it would have been a less jarring experience for viewers. Instead, watching Doug shove a dog off his couch repeatedly is abrasive and irritating to witness. The evil Norm Snively from Air Bud is arguably a more nuanced and complex figure than Doug, and he’s an alcoholic clown.

From there, Strays covers every single stereotype about dogs that you could ever imagine and, despite injecting expletives aplenty, feels like it was written by a child. We get jokes about peeing on things, jokes about humping things, jokes about hating mail carriers, jokes about how dogs hate fireworks, and, of course, jokes about dogs pooping. The experience feels almost reverse-engineered to include the most obvious jokes about everything dogs were known for and the narrative was meant to justify delivering these sequences, while also trying to be as vulgar as possible. Statistically speaking, it can be safe to assume someone involved with the movie owns a dog, but the absolutely insipid jokes about the most rudimentary elements of a dog’s existence make it feel like none of the filmmakers have ever even met a dog and just based their knowledge of them on family films. Every joke and every plot point feel like the result of Googling “what do dogs do?” and translating Wikipedia pages into a script.

The marketing materials for Strays have been embracing the R-rated nature of the movie as if that’s a selling point, but with so much of the movie featuring lowest-common-denominator dialogue, it almost feels like the root of the story genuinely was meant to be the tone of a family movie, only to have the vulgarities arbitrarily inserted into it. In fact, had Strays traded in a handful of sequences that were nothing more than opportunities for obscenities and instead attempted to embrace how adorable the canine stars are, it could have made for a more satisfying experience. There are even hints that the film had some things to say about the benefits of a found family as opposed to the more toxic situations you might have been born into, but that all feels obfuscated by all the low-hanging and obvious jokes about dog anatomy.

Even with how aggressively unfunny the script and story were, there are glimmers of promise buried within the offensively embarrassing jokes. For example, one scene sees our heroes encountering a dog who is lost in thought as he is manifesting perspectives often seen in more heartwarming movies, only for the film to reveal something much more sinister going on. However, the rest of Strays doesn’t come across as any type of parody, so this self-referential glimpse into what the movie could have leaned into ends up being more frustrating. There’s even a celebrity cameo that feels entirely out of place, which could be seen as humorous, only for the cameo itself to reference the randomness of the cameo, undercutting any delight at the absurdity. 

One sequence in Strays first focuses on a dog’s erection before pivoting to being about massive amounts of dog poop, and this ten-minute stretch is the entire movie in a nutshell. The concept and script feel like they were from the bin of rejected pitches for family-friendly comedies from the ’90s, with the only updates being injecting crude humor that would hopefully distract from how formulaic every component of the movie was. Even the moments where scenes start to earn some goodwill, these exchanges are immediately undercut by incredibly obvious and infantile exchanges. 

Audiences, critics, and filmmakers alike have voiced their frustrations about how the only movies to earn major theatrical releases are blockbuster franchises and how it leaves no room for smaller-budgeted comedies, and Strays only serves as a reminder of just how mindless and abjectly unfunny these studio-backed, mainstream comedies typically are. Now that Strays is being unleashed, it’s easy to see how it could have been shot in 2021 and taken two years to be released, even after recent delays pushed its opening deeper into summer. Much like how time passes for dogs, the arduous Strays makes its 90-minute run time feel seven times longer than it really is. If nothing else, we hope the movie’s ultimate release on home video will allow you to watch the dogs be cute while muting the actual dialogue, though even then, watching 90 minutes of funny dog videos on YouTube might be a more fulfilling way to spend your time.

Rating: 1 out of 5

Strays hits theaters on August 18th.