Plotwise, this movie VERY much resembled the recent Lassie movie. Angry city kid forced to live in country in the childhood home of his deceased mother, falls in love with a girl who he goes to the fair with, bullies like to beat him up in unfair fights, and saves the day. . . besides the canine element. In other ways, it was similar to Babe, the original talking animal movie. Also, in that Wiley, the kid talks to the farm animals, seems a lot like Charlotte's Web.
These two movies, Lassie and Babe, and book, Charlotte's Web, though, are fun children's movies with silly but endearing plots, but Dog's Best Friend seemed to have a rather forced plot, as if they're straining to get this movie working. The animals don't seem realistic. Yes, they talk, but so do the animals in Babe and Homeward Bound, but those animals seem as though they could really be saying these things. But not these animals. The characters that the voices create do not seem to flow with who the animals really are, what they would be saying and thinking whether or not a human could understand them.
The human actors are pretty good. The grandmother's character, played by Shirley Jones, is very eccentric, and at first I was concerned that she would be an idiot, but I was pleased that her character was developed beyond being "eccentric." Indeed, I think that the grandparents were the best actors in the movie. However, I felt that the science professor, billed as "Bobcat Goldthwaite," basically ruined the whole movie. Not only does he make it perhaps inappropriate for young children in a dramatic kissing display, but he acts like a complete idiot who just escaped from the looney bin. He knows NOTHING about science, and yet he is supposed to teach science at the high school? Even hick towns have better than this! He doesn't even have the brains to figure out that he has a smudge on his glasses and that there is nothing flying around in front of his face. His voice is shrill and completely annoying. He obviously has no life, as he spends late hours in the science lab at the high school conducting pseudo-science experiments. Furthermore, there is no character development into his character (is it fair to call this a character?) and every time this idiot came on screen I resisted the urge to turn off the movie.
Aside from the idiot science professor, which greatly exasperated me, this movie isn't that bad, despite it's copycat of several other movies.
