Watch the trailer for "The Secret Life of Pets." (Universal Pictures/Los Angeles Times) For Max, life is pure bliss: He adores his owner, Katie (Ellie Kemper), and has free rein over her New York City apartment - that is, until Katie brings home an enormous, shaggy brown rescue named Duke (Eric Stonestreet), forcing Max to share his creature comforts. Seuss adaptations "The Lorax" and "Horton Hears a Who!") have concocted a familiar lost-and-found fable starring Max, a floppy-eared, skinny-legged terrier with a big brown nose and the average-guy voice of Louis C.K. The three screenwriters (whose combined credits include the "Despicable Me" movies as well as the Dr.
Arriving in the dog days of an unusually mediocre summer for big-studio entertainments, the picture is a glorified hairball pulled together from the strands of better, more appealing movies and then noisily coughed up and disgorged at a multiplex near you. Opening with a Taylor Swift-scored tribute to New York and ending with a traffic-stopping action climax that has the grave misfortune of following "Finding Dory" into theaters, "The Secret Life of Pets" is governed by a spirit not of revelation but of confirmation.
No, the questions and possibilities raised by this new feature-length cartoon - antically directed by Chris Renaud and his co-director, Yarrow Cheney - are too deep and perplexing to be discussed in such crass commercial terms.ĭoes the movie perhaps mean to enlighten the stereotypically inclined animal lovers in the audience - to show us that dogs can be more than dumb, slobbering oafs and that not all cats are contemptuous, self-absorbed snobs? That unbeknownst to us, our favorite domestic animals are actually fascinating, fully developed characters in their own right? Now that we've observed the secret lives of bees, the American teenager and Walter Mitty, does this latest tell-all actually contain any secrets worth spilling? Why does "The Secret Life of Pets" exist? I mean besides the obvious reasons, like the bankability of family-friendly animation, the ticket surcharges for 3-D or the fact that Universal Pictures and Illumination Entertainment are trying to boost their share of the non-Minion collectible toy market.
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