Oh My Dog (Tamil,Amazon Prime Video)
Rating: ***
Fun for families out to enjoy a fluffy cuddly fable on a blind dog who finds a home in a warm kind family, Oh my Dog is so well-intended and so oozing with the milk of human kindness, it would almost be sacrilegious to not like the film.
The product has a sweet positive vibe to it. But that’s about all. It makes no attempt to paw its way beneath the surface. The cloying sweetness and the obstinate staginess of the presentation gets to you after a while.
Some months ago there was another Tamil film Mughizh, a simple story told in a language that was not spoken. The language of the heart spilt out of the storytelling. The set-up was as unadorned as it comes. There was a husband and a wife, played well by Vijay Sethupathi and Regina Cassandra. And there was their 10-year daughter Kavya played by Sethupathi’s real-life daughter Sreeja .At first little Kavya hates pets, and recoils from their company. Once the dog Scoobie arrived he had the entire family eating out of its hands.
In Oh My Dog real-life father and son Arun Vijay and Arnav Vijay star as father-son who train a blind puppy for a canine competition and ….we know the rest.
Oh My Dog is unapologetically formulistic.It is ramrod straight in its pleasant intentions. The writer-director Sarov Shanmugam aims to take the film more at a pre-teen audience. The grownups on screen are mere props while the focus is on the child Arjun(Arnav Vijay) and the blind dog Simba.
Borrowing the Steven Spielberg ET formula the first-half is devoted to Arjun concealing the dog from his parents.The second-half gets deliriously aspirational with the dog putting up a star turn that could put the biggest of our screen heroes to shame.At heart Oh My Dog aims to be as minimally clever as the film’s title.
Efforts to make the plot kids-friendly include two bumbling smalltime goons, one wearing a hideous nose-ring and the other wearing a scowl that would scare a baby in a cradle on a bad-hair day.Such characters give away the low aspirations of the film.The performances match the tenor and mood of presentation. Every performer seems to be infusing every scene with a rush of artificial gusto. The only natural is the dog . It doesn’t try to act blind.
