The main point of “Old Dogs” is to subject its stars ““ Robin Williams, John Travolta and Seth Green, mostly ““ to enough pain and humiliation to take the place of an interesting plot. It’s a grand metaphor, I’m pretty sure, for the pain and humiliation one experiences while watching the movie.
Williams plays Dan, an aging single man who cannot connect with children, a role undermined entirely by the fact that Williams voiced the genie in “Aladdin” and is generally one of the more kid-friendly actors available.
Travolta is Charlie, Dan’s sports marketing business partner and best bud; the script insists that Charlie is a ladies’ man, but Travolta’s total lack of charm says otherwise.
As Charlie tells their prospective Japanese clients in one of the opening scenes, when Dan got divorced some seven years ago, he sunk into a deep depression. Naturally, Charlie did what any good friend would do and took Dan to Florida, where Dan got hammered and married a woman named Vicki (Kelly Preston, Travolta’s wife), whom he met at a bar. Charlie’s punch line, which the Japanese businessmen for some reason find amusing, is that Dan got divorced twice in one 24-hour period. If only that were the end of it.
Instead, what happens is Vicki contacts Dan and asks him to meet her. Dan wants to look good for the meet, so he gets a spray tan. Shockingly, the tanning goes horribly wrong.
Vicki meets up with Dan and tells him that she’s going to jail for two weeks because of some kind of political activism. Also, he’s the father of her two children.
The plan is for Vicki’s best friend to take care of the kids for those two weeks, but the best friend is a hand model, so of course Dan accidentally smashes her hands in the trunk of a car. Dan is forced to take care of the kids, because Vicki has no other friends.
I include such a detailed plot summary because it’s important to stress just how contrived and witless this movie is. “Old Dogs” lasts a painfully long 88 minutes, and in all that time there is not a single punch line you won’t see coming from several miles away. If you happen to enjoy any of those punch lines, though, you’re in luck, because you’ll probably see it two or three more times before the end.
Things will also turn sentimental before the end, but “Old Dogs” fails just as miserably in that department. Williams and Preston have no chemistry whatsoever, the kids (Conner Rayburn and Ella Bleu Travolta) never develop anything more than rough sketches of childlike behavior, and the moralizing comes easy and shallow.
Even the quirky cameo appearances, usually the saving grace for low-IQ family comedies such as this, are humorless. It’s bad enough to waste the talents of Justin Long and Matt Dillon, but it is a downright tragedy that this might be the last we see of the late Bernie Mac.
This is, theoretically, a story about learning to be a father, but if anyone is watching “Old Dogs” looking for parenting advice, there is but one message they should take away from it ““ no matter what you do, never, ever make your kids watch this movie.
E-mail Goodman at agoodman@media.ucla.edu.