At One Point the Soccer Team is Disqualified Because One of Them is a Dog. This is the Best Part of the Film.

I have never seen an Air Bud film before. I didn’t think there would be much I had to learn. I sort of assumed a film where a golden retriever is good at basketball wasn’t the kind of film with massive implications for its sequels. The dog is good at basketball, he wins a championship, move on. I didn’t even really think the second film would be necessary to watch, the dog is great at American Football, he wins a championship, again, move on. But once I was ten minutes into this film I realized I was adrift in a sea of nineties hair and drunk clowns.

 The plot is basically the same as the ones I’ve listed above; replace Basketball or Football with Soccer and you’ve got the basic idea. Throw in a forced love story between Air Bud and another golden retriever and some nasty dog nappers and you have the entire film. It seems like pretty typical kids movie fare; a dog farts, someone falls over, a child is precocious, credits, but it’s not. It’s just not. The whole film feels wrong, just wrong, the movement, the dialogue, the story. None of it seems natural in the slightest

  I don’t know if you’ve ever seen anyone try to improvise a story, perhaps at some kind of theatre sports event, or, better yet, if you’ve ever watched someone telling a particularly involved lie, but if you have, then you should have a good idea of how this film moves from one sequence to the next. It feels as though the director had all these sets and costumes, three days in which to film, and literally no script. Every single line of dialogue feels improvised. If I found out there was no script I would genuinely not be surprised. It feels like they just put the actors in costume and yelled, “THIS WOMAN IS DESIREABLE!” the instant before they started rolling. Less is more, pretty much always, a good film is economical with its dialogue; it uses it for exposition and character building in a way that seems genuine and natural. The third film in the Air Bud saga treats dialogue like air freshener, heaping it over everything and just hoping.

   This film, at its core, is a film without charm. It’s not nice to watch a film where everyone obviously doesn’t want to be there. The characters are just big walking stereotypes, but they’re not even fully fledged examples of that. A character that is just: ‘Nerdy Kid’ in big block letters is fine, I can handle that; it can be great. But a character that is three lines of vaguely nerdy dialogue and a painful joke about kilts is just offensive. The romantic interest is a… well they say she’s British, but it’s either a South African or perhaps even an Australian girl. They try to make her sound more English by peppering her dialogue with awkward Briticisms like ‘Twit’ and, apparently, ‘Higgledy Piggledy’, but it just makes the whole affair all the more painful to experience. The dog nappers are lazily evil, they want to steal a dog. They keep calling it a poodle, but it’s clearly not a poodle. I don’t know if this is a joke. That, I mean that’s pretty much a microcosm of the film. Something happens and I am at a loss as to whether it was intentional or just more awkwardness.

   I hate this film, with Ace Ventura Jr. I had some respect for the goofiness of the whole affair, the cartoonish nonsense, the fat child channelling Jim Carrey. This film is soulless though, no one is having a good time, things happen and I don’t understand why they’re happening. So many subplots are occurring at once that I genuinely had trouble keeping track of them. I’m going to try and list them, let’s see: Romantic Subplot for Lead Male, Romantic Subplot for Lead Dog, Awkward Step Father, New Butler for Female Lead’s Father, Evil Dog Nappers, and Lead Dog becomes father. That’s too many, like, at least five subplots too many. Come on Air Bud.

   There’s so much more wrong with this film, so many things that just don’t make sense, ninety-five percent of the first half is dogs moving from one place to another, and the second half is basically just montages. Anything that’s not one of the two is an awkward exchange of dialogue. I thought, when I first became disturbed and confused, that maybe watching the rest of the Air Bud canon would make at least some of this make sense, but now that it’s over I highly doubt it. The very fact that this film went on to spawn at least ten sequels and spin offs is absolutely mind blowing. How did Director Bill Bannerman manage to make a hideous mess out of: Dog is good at Soccer and saves the day?