Metacritic reviews

There’s a refreshingly contained, deadpan sass to many of the characters’ personalities – and even Marino’s direction of the actors — that makes these people appealing, not abrasive, and which never devolves into the needlessly crude or ham-fistedly improvised, as so often happens in the more raucously engineered R-rated comedies.

No spoiler here that all unfolds with twists and complications but lands in a colorful kibble bowl of happy endings. Surprise does lie in the fact that such familiar material can deliver some unexpected pleasures.

As any dog lover will tell you, our four-legged friends make everything better. That’s especially true when it comes to the genial if overly familiar ensemble comedy “Dog Days,” whose four-legged stars bring out the best in the movie’s crisscross of humans — and in the film itself.

Unfortunately, the behaviors on display have virtually nothing to do with real life, serving as empty escapism for the dog lover in all of us.

For undemanding audiences not looking for too much substance in the summer's dog days, Dog Days should go down relatively easy.

It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny. But an engaging cast — human and canine — give it, and us, almost enough warm-and-fuzzies to get by.

Dogs are notorious scene-stealers in the movies, but in the sappy yet mildly entertaining Dog Days, the humans mug just as shamelessly as their impossibly cute canine counterparts.

Dog Days isn't so much a movie as an emotional delivery system, meant to make you laugh a little, cry a little and say, "Awww" about 10,000 times. On that front, it's a complete success. As an actual film, well, not so much.

If Dog Days were a little weirder, it would just be a smug anti-comedy takedown of a late-period Garry Marshall picture, like "They Came Together" with its biggest laughs edited out.

Aside from the occasional idiosyncratic comic beat, Dog Days remains committed to coloring within the lines of established tropes in the animal-centric family film.