Old Dogs (2009)

Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

Fantastic!

Am I Missing Something?

It's a mild crowd pleaser for people who are exhausted by blockbusters.

Sometimes, I thought there were two Robin Williams. There was the one who made "Aladdin," "Hook" and "Mrs. Doubtfire," and one who made "Awakenings," "Bicentennial Man" and "Man of the Year." This movie may belong to the latter one. "Old Dogs" stars Robin Williams and John Travolta who play two entrepreneurs in the middle of a large business deal, but then Williams discovers he has two kids from a wild fling Travolta created a few years earlier. Promising the mother to take care of the kids for two weeks very obviously wrecks their deal, their lives and their bank accounts. It's a plot device we've seen several times before done better in several other movies like "Jungle 2 Jungle" and it ends pretty much the exact same way it always has with the sudden father giving it all up for a life with the kids. There's no new spin, no real jokes and no credibility. In fact, the set-ups to the jokes are predictable. When Williams and Travolta talk about the after-effects of their medications, you can predict they're all going to be mixed up. What the movie does have is a stellar case of celebrity cameos from Seth Green, Lori Loughlin, Kelly Preston, Dax Shepard, Luis Guzman, Matt Dillon, Justin Long and Ann-Margret. Unfortunately, the cartoonish gags aren't very funny, and the plot isn't believable. At no point does Williams even come close to acting like a father and placing some boundaries on his kids to save himself some grief. However, the movie did do well enough to be called successful so apparently it has enough appeal to kids if not to parents.

Robin Williams and John Travolta are both legends of the silver screen so it is such a shame to see them turn up in this pretty poor Disney family comedy.The premise is borrowed a lot from 'Three Men and a Baby' but this film can't claim to be as a smart or as funny as that film. Too often the stars are reduced to doing ridiculous things in order to score a cheap laugh, and the attempts at sentiment are wasted because we just don't care enough about the main characters in order to do so.I tried to like this film, I tried to stick with it, but even my admiration for the two stars couldn't maintain my interest.

Disney has put out some good movies, and some stinkers. This movie fits firmly in the latter category. John Travolta and Robin Williams phone in their performances in this uneven mix of slapstick and schmaltz. John Travolta and Robin Williams play business partners who run a sports marketing firm, but when Robin Williams' character finds out he has children, he and Travolta have to play dad for a couple of weeks while the mother serves a little time in jail. Nothing about the plot was fresh or interesting although, to Disney's credit, they really don't deal with much outside of formula filmmaking anyway. There were a couple of visual gags that were legitimately funny...the first time around. But then they just keep using the same jokes over and over again. Kids might enjoy adults getting hit repeatedly in the groin, but not me. And then to make matters worse, there's some humor insinuating that the main characters are gay, which will go right over children's heads. Ultimately, this film is aimed at families with young children, but the humor is hackneyed at best and I don't see parents enjoying it too much. The message about the importance of family is admirable, but Disney has done much better than this in the past. Ultimately, this won't go down in the annals of Disney history as even a good film, and it certainly is one of the worst films that John Travolta and Robin Williams have ever made. Some old dogs just need to be put to sleep.

Old Dogs is a great family film, as the majority of Amazon reviewers have said. The comedy is obvious, the slapstick infantile and the script isn't Shakespeare. Viewed as such, it's good, modern family fun.Critics always only want to see another Citizen Kane and when they don't they get all huffy and bloated and denounce movies such as this as not worth the little round bits of plastic that DVDs are made from. The drug-swap scene is very obvious but for a ten year old, it's absolutely hilarious.John Travolta and Robin Williams work well together - William's gift for comedy is well known but Travolta's, not, but he does have the knack for it. Like other comedy duos, there's an easy chemistry that cannot be invented by any script or by any director.However, I'm not a family man and watched it as an adult, on my own, so I could see where others would have found it really funny but was less so for me. I'm used to watching deep and meaningful and World cinema films, the sort that do keep the critics in a job but unlike them, I'm thinking outside of their blinkered box and am thinking of others.My three stars are for a film that was funny, but not really worthy of four stars, when you consider that four stars should be reserved for things a bit special.