"Snow Dogs" is a throwaway movie, but that doesn't mean it's bad. In fact, if you have a soft spot for man's best friend, it's a pretty good throwaway movie.
True, it ought to have been a lot better given Cuba Gooding Jr.'s loony buoyancy as the story's hapless hero and his natural ease in connecting with the show's real stars – a pack of frisky Siberian huskies and one break-your-heart border collie. But every time the picture starts to gain comic momentum, director Brian Levant ("Beethoven," "The Flintstones") can't sustain it. He can't even keep a running joke running. He'd rather just get to the next dog scene, as if each one were an independent set piece.
Joanna Bacalso and Cuba Gooding Jr. star in "Snow Dogs."
(Walt Disney Pictures)
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Still, as cornball as some of those scenes are, they have their effect. Even if you're older than 13, meaning that in the eyes of the intended audience you're over the hill, don't think you'll get out of the theater without smiling more than once, even when you know you're being shamelessly manipulated.
A Disney product, "Snow Dogs" harks back to an era when the studio only cranked out goofy fun for the whole family. Ted Brooks (Gooding) is a young and fabulously successful Miami dentist who learns, by way of a completely unexpected inheritance, that he was adopted. His real mother appears to have been a loner in Alaska, where she recently died and left him most of her estate.
Off he goes, this pampered playboy of chic beaches, to the wilds of the frozen frontier, where much cliched slapstick ensues (ridiculously overdressing, constantly falling on ice, etc.).
More than finding out exactly what he has inherited, Ted wants to know his real family history. The first part he learns soon enough – basically a remote cabin full of championship sled dogs.
Ted soon runs afoul of Thunder Jack (James Coburn), who's the local tough guy, the mountain man who's more mountain than man. Doesn't talk much, likes people even less. The old grouch wants no truck with Ted. Jack's only interest is getting the prize dogs from him: The Arctic Challenge, a long and rough race à la the famous Iditarod, is coming up, and Jack wants them for his sled. No deal, says Ted, at least not until he gets some answers. Meantime, the dogs, smelling a city slicker a mile off, have a lot of fun at Ted's expense.
Indeed, talk about having fun with some old narrative formulas: Want a character in an environment he's never experienced before? They don't come pregnant with more comic possibility than an upper-middle-class, sun-'n'-fun black man in the Alaskan bush in winter. (Ted's best line, which Gooding delivers perfectly deadpan, is his answer to his adoptive mother when she calls to ask what's it like up there: "Everything's so white.") There's also a wonderful dream bit in which Michael Bolton, playing himself, advises Ted on how to have soul. But the screenplay – by no fewer than five writers – never really develops the central relationship, and Levant doesn't exploit the many quirky variations on it available to him, at least not in any way that builds comic tension. His strategy seems to be use everything once, then toss it. Ted's presence in an exaggeratedly white world is briefly played for laughs, for instance, then abandoned. (Think of what Mel Brooks would have done with this.) More to the point, Ted's confrontation with his reluctant father implies a very real need Ted has to connect.
When it's clear that scheming Thunder Jack basically has no respect for any man who can't drive a sled, Ted becomes determined to prove he can learn how to be a musher.
Prove to whom, though? To Jack, at first, but Levant then focuses in increasingly on Ted as a man obsessed with proving it to himself. Ted's later scenes with Jack have none of the delirious spirit and drive of his various attempts to assert domain over some wily dogs with serious attitude problems. Gooding is captivating in those scenes. So are the dogs – particularly in action sequences, hokey ones included, in which Roger Bondelli's editing is mesmerizing. But the relationship with Jack just lopes along, an also-ran when it should be a front-runner.
Coburn may have suspected there was no competing with a lovable bunch of canines; maybe that's why his performance seems bored and flat. Whatever the reason, when he and Gooding were together it was hard to avoid a thought inspired by a previous Gooding movie:
Show me the dogs.
SNOW DOGS (PG, 95 minutes) – contains mild crude humor. At area theaters.
