Woof to all that

Marley & Me
PG, Nationwide

Marley grows, though, and before the Grogans know it he’s a 100lb steamroller who is expelled from obedience school, chews everything, eats the sofa and humps whatever leg happens to be going. I’m not sure this makes him ‘the world’s worst dog’.If he’d put a bomb on a plane then, yes, but this is just bad behaviour of the kind we are meant to find loveable, and do, although come on. If John and Jenny had had the wit to persist with the training then Marley might have at least been allowed off-lead sometimes. As golden a couple as they are, I rather think Marley deserved more. And I didn’t even feel they liked him that much, although it could have just been the acting. (It’s not as easy as you think. You try it.)

This is directed by David Frankel, who also directed The Devil Wears Prada, and this film suffers from exactly what that film suffered from: not knowing whose film it is. Prada was Meryl Streep’s film and every time the film forgot that it flatlined. This is Marley’s film and every time the film forgets this, which it often does, it flatlines too. Marley increasingly becomes a backdrop to the ups and downs in the Grogans’ family life, and they are not even interesting ups and downs. Their problems are as banal, bland and dull and clichéed as they are.

OK, I admit I cried a small bucket at the end — the shamelessly milked, outrageously drawn-out end — but at least I hated myself for it. This is bland and obsequious tripe or, as my own dog would say, ‘Woof!’ I love dogs and all that, but I’ve yet to hear one say anything sensible about film.