Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Strays’ on VOD, an Unapologetically Raunchy, Stupidly Funny Talking-Dog Flick

An alternate title for Strays (now streaming on VOD services like Amazon Prime Video) could be Look Who’s Saying F— Now. It’s the heartwarming story of a scruffy little dog who speaks with the voice of Will Ferrell, and dreams of returning home so he can gnaw on the gonads of the owner who abandoned him. You can just feel your heart about to burst, can’t you? Director Josh Greenbaum follows up his people-will-laugh-at-anything-during-a-global-pandemic comedy Barb and Star Go To Vista Del Mar with this crude, nasty, insanely R-rated, unabashedly scatological talking-animal adventure that eventually broke down my boundaries like a brawny stream of Rottweiler whiz to a snowbank. I’m better than this, you’re better than this, we’re ALL better than this, but it’s also OK if I, you and we laughed our asses off while watching it.

STRAYS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Reggie (Ferrell) is a Border Terrier, which is one of those absurdly photogenic little dogs who exist to nip at the heels of a kid, chasing a tennis ball for hours on sunny Saturday afternoons. So it’s all the more tragic that Reggie ended up with Doug (Will Forte), a sloppy, unemployed serial masturbator who doesn’t love his dog or himself or life or existence or anything, really. Doug’s ex-girlfriend loved Reggie, and when she finally wised up and dumped Doug, he kept the dog purely out of spite. Reggie doesn’t understand any of this; he interprets Doug’s abuse as love, and therefore has pledged his heart to this angry, self-hating loser. How devoted is Reggie? He thinks Doug’s multiple attempts to abandon him is a game, which Reggie wins every time he manages to follow his nose home from various far-off locales. Poor pup doesn’t realize he’s in a relationship that makes The Burning Bed look like a Hallmark rom-com.

Now, we could translate Reggie’s codependency as symptomatic of being a stereotypically loyal dog, and we wouldn’t be too far off-base. But we’ll soon learn that such naivete isn’t inherent to all canines, at least in this movie. Exasperated by Reggie’s fierce devotion, and angry that the pup accidentally broke his favorite bong, Doug drives a few hours to a city, drops him in a scuzzy vacant lot and speeds away. And now Reggie’s the dog equivalent of a fish out of water, a situation remedied by Bug (Jamie Foxx), a hardened Boston Terrier from the streets who teaches him the Way of the Stray, which is a phrase I made up, not the movie. It involves staking your claim to territory by urinating on things, knowing where you can get a hearty slice of dropped pizza, stuff like that. They befriend an Australian Shepherd named Maggie (Isla Fisher) and a Great Dane named Hunter (Randall Park), whose relationship to his Cone of Shame is kinda like Linus to his security blanket. The four dogs bond as a pack when they get drunk on garbage water and find some lovely inanimate objects to mount. 

It’s probably not worth noting the romantic tension between Maggie and Hunter, evident by what’s happening with Hunter’s little red rocket down there, which isn’t little at all (I mean, he’s a Great Dane after all). It’s also probably not worth noting that Bug is in love with a couch he used to routinely desecrate during his time as a family pet, the details of which are revealed later in a tear-soaked flashback. But here I am noting these things anyway, as examples of this movie’s brand of comedy, which is on level with a squat toilet. Bug, Hunter and Maggie all look a little cockeyed at Reggie when he tells them his backstory, and about how he thinks Doug reciprocates his unconditional love. So they break the truth to him: Poor Reggie’s in an abusive relationship. In the light of this harsh reality, Bug and Hunter and Maggie vow, come hell or high water, to help Reggie make the long and arduous journey home so he can bite Doug’s dick off. 

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Babe: Pig in the City, Homeward Bound, Look Who’s Talking Now, the Marmaduke with Owen Wilson, Sausage Party and, perhaps for obvious reasons, Trash Humpers.

Performance Worth Watching Hearing: Reggie is a naif pooch who’s kinda the canine version of Buddy the Elf, and even though this is something Ferrell can do in his sleep, the shtick is, at least in this context, pretty funny. 

Memorable Dialogue: Reggie envies the thing that Doug loves the most: “Sometimes I wish I was a penis!”

Sex and Skin: Does a Great Dane boner or a mutt mounting a garden gnome count?

Our Take: Strays is lowbrow and moronic, obsessed with poop and puke, crudely hacked together and seemingly written by and for prepubescent boys to sneak-watch when their parents aren’t paying attention. Its visual acuity is hampered by the limitations of working with a primary cast consisting of trained animals. It’s frequently stomach-churning, and the ickiest scenes tend to linger like the last drunk to stumble out of the party. For a while, I was unamused. Then I was surprised by the poignant manner in which Greenbaum handled the heartbreaking stories of how some of these dogs became strays, which skewed the film’s grossout factor from 95 percent to, well, about 94 percent.

And then, the needle drops on Miley Cyrus’ ‘Wrecking Ball’ during the movie’s big climactic sequence, and I roared and cackled and let it all out and wiped a few tears from my eyes and felt good about it. It happens: Sometimes you get blindsided by a slab of puerile, asinine comedy and you have no choice but to submit to it as your better judgment and notions of good taste expeditiously swirl straight down the crapper. 

Prior to that, Strays struck me as a borderline-tolerable spoof of family-movie and revenge-flick tropes propped up by a clunky assemblage of cute-dogs-doing-ugly-things cognitive-dissonance gags. It indulges many cliches of road comedies, you know, the inevitable scenes where the protagonists accidentally ingest hallucinogenic drugs, get thrown in jail, etc. (narrative traps, I have to note, recently employed by Book Club: The Next Chapter – or was it 80 for Brady? I can’t tell these things apart anymore). But once in a while an inspired ending swoops in to salvage things, pushing them from marginal to watchable – and in this case, kind of almost maybe probably endearing, because what kind of j-hole doesn’t root for the well-being of lost dogs? Nobody’s going to accuse the movie of being a thoughtful examination of physical and emotional abuse, or a tender story about outcasts finding strength and affirmation in their newfound friendships. But it might just inspire some healthy, cleansing laughter, which you might not expect from a movie that’s essentially about dogs sniffing each other’s hindquarters. 

Our Call: I liked this stupid-ass movie and I’m not going to apologize for it. STREAM IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.