The Secret Life of Pets

I don’t know if I’ll be able to trust any of my pets from here on out after seeing this one.

Further bolstering Illumination Entertainment’s resume outside of the Despicable Me franchise and its spinoffs, The Secret Life of Pets follows Max (Louis C.K.) as his doggy life is turned upside down after his owner, Katie (Ellie Kemper), brings home an overly large and formidable dog named Duke (Eric Stonestreet), who clearly isn’t about to let Max take control of his new living situation. Soon it becomes apparent that Max needs Duke out of the picture as fast as possible before his perfect life with Katie is ruined forever, so, as bad dogs do, Max plans to get rid of Duke only for it to backfire and get them both caught by the local dogcatchers. Now it’s a race to get back home before Max and Duke, relentlessly being pursued by a homicidal bunny rabbit named Snowball (Kevin Hart) and a gang of alley cats, manage to stop them for good.

Much like a certain movie about the “secret” life of toys, The Secret Life of Pets takes an extremely fun idea and milks the living shit out of it to great effect. This premise might not be the newest thing in the world, but make no mistake; this movie is absolutely hilarious. The idea of what your pet does while you’re not at home is used to its fullest potential in almost every scene ranging from what your asshole cat does the second you walk out the door, to seeing that your pet bird’s most intimate desire is to be one with the fighter jets as they streak across the sky, to the fact that your most beloved pet throws bangers for the animal community while you’re gone for the weekend. Everything here is just so funny and on point that I honestly think that if I could look in on any unsuspecting pet while their owners are out, this would be exactly what they’d be doing.

For the most part, each time a new animal is introduced they immediately help to freshen up the film before it falls into a rut. Between Kevin Hart’s perfect take on a clearly insane yet lovable bunny rabbit named Snowball, to the creepy predatory restraint shown in Albert Brook’s take on a hawk named Tiberius, to Gidget (Jenny Slate), a female dog who pines for the love of Max and hilariously will not let anything stop her from her mission; everyone is pretty much on point casting wise. While some characters get more screen time than others, I never really found the movie to be too stuffed with characters that any of them got lost in the shuffle, which is a good thing considering practically every character is so much fun to watch.

With all of this great comedy and fun characters strewn throughout, you’d think that’d be enough to carry the film even if the script happens to stumble from time to time, but unfortunately, that’s not the case here — not entirely at least. While the strengths of the film do wonders to add a little bit of meat to the proceedings, it’s when the film slows down to try and show some emotion, character arcs, story progression, or relationships between characters that most of it falls completely on its face, dragging the film to mediocre territory along with it.

It’s not that the filmmakers didn’t have the right ideas in mind, it’s just that I didn’t care for much of what was going on outside of the laughs and witty dialogue that feels just right coming out of these animals’ mouths. For example, there’s a scene late in the film where we are told about the tragic back-story behind Duke and why he came to be in Max’s company in the first place. In theory, it’s a pretty heart wrenching tale, but after seeing the way that Duke had acted throughout the film and his motivations throughout, I couldn’t help but hope for the scene to end to get back to the funny bits. I feel like if the script lent itself to being more story driven than gag riddled, this scene might have landed with some more weight and heft, adding another layer to Duke’s character and making the feels real. Instead, I just wondered how many buckets of tears I’d have to sop up if Pixar had taken a shot at this scene and patiently waited until the next wave of hilarious antics came about.

This is more or less how I felt about the film as a whole; it’s great in spots but sorely lacking in the well-rounded sense that one expects from a film like this, especially coming from the studio that made a super-villain a lovable father figure to a bunch of orphan kids. Besides the fact that Max and Duke’s storyline is basically Toy Story with more or less unlikable dicks in the lead, the other separate storylines following Gidget and her search, and Snowball as he chases down Max in the name of eradicating the human race, are at least halfway decent because they don’t try for much other than laughs and setting up exciting action set pieces.

Other than that, I honestly wish I saw this film in 3D if only because of the beautiful imagery the filmmakers manage to pull off regarding the scope and scale of New York City. Between some really cool shots of the city with buildings stretching high up to the clouds and motion at every layer from the foreground all the way back to the horizon, there’s a lot going on at a technical level that I enjoyed more than I thought I would. Couple that with a truly great epilogue that touches on why pets are so special to their owner and to humanity as a whole, and you have a pretty decent, if not flawed film that could have been better if a tad more effort was put forth.

Big on laughs but more “at least you tried!” for everything else; The Secret Life of Pets has a lot going for it based solely on the subject matter and comedy at hand, but underwhelms when it comes to telling an actual story with weight and consequence. With some brilliance sprinkled throughout, there’s no reason why a likely sequel can’t expand upon what worked so well here while cutting the slow and relatively boring parts.