Air Bud (1997)

This review includes full spoilers. Proceed accordingly. For other movie reviews from me, click HERE:

Dusty: Ain’t no rules says a dog can’t write movie reviews.

Rating: PG
Director: Charles Martin Smith
Writers: Kevin DiCicco, Paul Tamasy, Aaron Mendelsohn
Stars: Kevin Zegers, Michael Jeter, Bill Cobbs, Wendy Makkena,
Release Date: August 1, 1997 (United States)
Run time: 1 hour, 38 minutes

THE PLOT:

via wiki:

After the death of his father, Josh Framm, his mother Jackie, and his two-year-old sister Andrea have relocated to Fernfield, Washington. One day after school, Josh practices basketball by himself in a makeshift court that he sets up behind an abandoned church, where he meets an abandoned and runaway Golden Retriever who had recently escaped from his abusive owner: an alcoholic clown named Norman Snively, who had locked him in a kennel for causing trouble at a birthday party when the kennel unknowingly fell out due to Snively not securing the back. Discovering his uncanny ability to play basketball, Josh names him Buddy and takes him home. Jackie agrees to let Buddy stay until Christmas. Once the holidays arrive, Jackie allows Josh to keep Buddy as a Christmas present.

At school, Josh earns the disdain of star basketball player and team bully Larry Willingham but befriends kindhearted maintenance engineer and retired pro player Arthur Chaney. With Chaney’s encouragement, Josh earns a place on the Timberwolves, the school basketball team, despite the reservation of their competitive coach, Joe Barker. He befriends teammate Tom Stewart at his first game. Buddy escapes and shows up at school during the game. The audience loves him when he scores a basket.

Barker is fired after being caught emotionally and physically abusing Tom for his poor performance. At Josh’s suggestion, he is replaced by Chaney. Arthur emphasizes the need for players to work as a team instead of focusing on themselves. When Larry is subbed out due to ball-hogging and unsportsmanlike conduct, his father forces him to leave the team and join their rival. Buddy becomes the mascot of the school’s basketball team and appears in their halftime shows. The Timberwolves lose one game before qualifying for the State Finals.

Just before the championship game, Snively appears after seeing Buddy on television. Hoping to profit from Buddy’s newfound fame, he forces Jackie to hand over Buddy as he has papers proving he is the legal owner. Withdrawn and depressed, Josh discovers Snively living in a small income house and sneaks into his backyard, freeing Buddy from his chain. Snively notices him and pursues them in his dilapidated pickup truck through a park before crashing into a lake. Josh protects Buddy by setting him free in the forest to find a new life.

The Timberwolves struggle in the championship game and an injury leaves them with four players. Buddy shows up to the crowd’s cheers. After it is discovered that there is no rule preventing a dog from playing basketball, he is added to the roster and leads the team to victory.

Despite his ownership papers being ruined in the car wreck, Snively attempts to sue the Framm family for custody of Buddy. Chaney suggests that Buddy choose his owner. As a fan of Chaney, Judge Cranfield accepts his proposal and moves the court outside to the lawn, where Buddy attacks Snively and chooses Josh. Cranfield grants custody to Josh as a ranting Snively is dragged away by the police, while Josh and the rest of the citizens rejoice and gather around Buddy to welcome him home

The Review

Air Bud is a heart-warming and funny story about an adorable Golden Retriever dog who plays basketball, right? Good idea to watch this one with a kid, right? Well.. let me tell you… no. Absolutely not. I watched this movie with a child and deeply regret the choice. The whole movie was far more heart-burning than heart-warming and the film’s antagonist felt like an at-a-distance introduction to a serial killer. Even for the 1990s, a time trauma was played for laughs, this story was over the top.

We meet Bud as he works for an insane, drunk, abusive clown, while they’re entertaining for a children’s party. Yes, really. The primary dog-training weapon of choice for the clown is that of a rolled up newspaper. At the time, this was not a culturally insane training tool to use on a dog, but the movie plays it with so much menace that you might have expected Medieval torture devices to be wrapped up inside the newspaper. The guy who plays the clown plays him as someone so far over the edge that he’s gone from being down on his luck to someone whose anger is on a collision course with a lengthy prison sentence. The clown gets fired after the kids’ birthday party goes badly – a party at which Bud was the only bright spot – and he puts the dog in a travel kennel in the back of his serial killer clown truck, and he starts screaming about taking the dog to the pound. He drives recklessly toward the pound and he does so in such an out of control way that the dog kennel flies out of the back of the truck and lands in the middle of the highway. We then see Bud – trapped in his kennel – almost smashed by an oncoming semi-truck.

This is just the first ten minutes of the movie.

In additional animal abuse, probable drug abuse, and probable mental illness, the movie also covers the ground of 1) a protagonist whose father died (it wouldn’t be a Disney film if a kid didn’t lose at least one parent), 2) a protagonist at a new school with no friends, 3) a school bully who is a fellow student, 4) a school bully who is a P.E. teacher / coach, 5) the return of the evil clown man, who after seeing Bud make halftime shots on the news, comes to Josh’s house, intimidates Josh and his mother, and forcibly takes Bud away while Bud whines and Josh screams, 6) Josh later finding the clown man’s house, sneaking into the evil clown man’s yard, freeing a chained-up Bud, getting caught in the act, fleeing while being pursued by the clown who is behind the wheel of an erratically driven clown truck, 7) Josh, after barely escaping, being mean to and yelling at Bud in an effort to make him run away (which he eventually does), because Josh knows if he takes Bud back home with him that the evil clown man will return and take him from there again, 8) the earlier mentioned bully P.E. teacher / basketball coach being caught by a school administrator physically abusing a teammate of Josh and getting fired, 9) the evil clown man showing up at Josh’s next basketball game, just after Bud has just shown back up after being forced to run away, and trying to take Bud away again, on the court, in front of the entire town, 10) the town leaders deciding to have the local judge determine who should keep the dog – leading to a tense “who will the dog choose?” moment, wherein Bud feels anxious over the fact that the clown man seems to be threatening him with a rolled up newspaper if Bud doesn’t choose him, 11) the clown man being dragged away, screaming, by three or four police officers, after Bud chooses Josh.

Needless to say, the child who watched this with me is invested in the story but not because he loved it, but rather because this film traumatized him. We need to be sure that Bud and Josh are okay and that the evil clown man never bothered them again. So I am now required to watch the sequel to make sure that it’s a fun and funny movie about a dog who plays sports, not an episode of Criminal Minds.

As I said before… I do not recommend this movie. If you want to see Bud playing basketball, skip the movie and just pull up clips on YouTube.

What went wrong here? The story needed to pull WAY more of its punches. It’s one thing to see Bud’s travel kennel fall out of the back of a moving truck. That’s bad enough. Did we need to see it almost hit by a semi? No. I think I know where they were going with the former owner / antagonist. They were aiming at “comedically inept” adult antagonist. If you’re going for that, though, you need him to be a non-threat. Maybe his heart even thaws eventually. We didn’t get an inept clown. We got a dangerous clown who gave off murderer vibes. There was way, way too much anger in that performance. It was too real. I don’t know if that was on the director, or the actor, but it didn’t work. The whole movie was like that. It’s one thing to have a bully on Josh’s basketball team. Maybe that kid could learn a lesson and eventually end up friends with Josh. Instead we get a bully who learns nothing (in fact he switches schools and continues bullying Josh from his new team,) AND even worse, we also get an abusive P.E. teacher / coach who learns nothing. What’s the message here? Nobody’s ever safe?

There were some bright spots. I thought Kevin Zegers was really good as Josh (the movie gave him a surprisingly large amount of wide-ranging acting work to do and he pulled it off well) and Bud was always delightful when the story was taking a break from traumatizing its audience. The basketball part of it even felt far less implausible than it should have, given the idea.

Overall though… I do not recommend.