'Clifford The Big Red Dog' Review
PG: Impolite humor, thematic elements, and mild action
Runtime: 1 Hr and 37 Minutes
Production Companies: Paramount Pictures, Entertainment One, Scholastic Entertainment, New Republic Pictures, The Kerner Entertainment Company
Distributor: Paramount Pictures
Director: Walt Becker
Writers: Jay Scherick, David Ronn, Blaise Hemingway
Cast: Jack Whitehall, Darby Camp, Tony Hale, Sienna Guillory, David Alan Grier, Kenan Thompson, Russell Wong, John Cleese
Release Date: November 10, 2021
In Theaters and Paramount+
When middle-schooler Emily Elizabeth (Darby Camp) meets a magical animal rescuer (John Cleese) who gifts her a little red puppy, she never anticipated waking up to find a giant ten-foot hound in her small New York City apartment. While her single mom (Sienna Guillory) is gone for work, Emily and her fun but impulsive uncle Casey (Jack Whitehall) set out on an adventure that will keep you on the edge of your seat as our heroes take a bite out of the Big Apple.
When it comes to setting the stage for Clifford’s origin, the writers sort of understand the basis of the relationship between Emily Elizabeth and the iconic red dog. The first act, which establishes the ho-hum life of Emily Elizabeth (Darby Camp), tugged on my heartstrings. She moved into an East Harlem neighborhood with her mom (Sienna Guillory), and they live in a lavish apartment due to her mom being a successful yet busy paralegal. The 12-year-old kid is an outcast in her new private school, for she’s not as uppity as her snobbish upper-class peers. Mom only has time for work and hardly anything else, so Emily has to be babysat by her estranged screw-up Uncle Casey (Jack Whitehall). Given the lonely life she leads, you sympathize with Emily and root for her to have the cute CG dog. This dog is a necessity because she has nobody else.
Darby Camp and Jack Whitehall are the two functioning components that make this movie moderately fun. Camp carries the film with her effortlessly sweet and comedically cynical charm. A majority of the story focuses on Emily and her uncle Casey having to set aside their differences to protect and take care of Clifford, and when the comedy sets in, its effectiveness mostly stems from the banter Camp and Whitehall share. They have a fun dynamic with good comedic timing that had me chuckling throughout.
Uhhhhhh, what else? The watercolor illustrations featured in the end credits are pretty good.
Clifford the Big Red Dog has been a phenomenon in media for as long as I can remember. I grew up reading the books in grade school and watching the PBS Kids show where John Ritter voiced the titular character before his passing. Since that cartoon, Clifford has had an animated movie, a reboot series, a plentiful amount of books, and is the official mascot to the publisher Scholastic. So, it hurts to see his live-action adaptation be a lazy, formulaic product of a Hollywood trend that seriously needs to end right now.
Somewhere in Hollywood, there’s a rogue producer who’s making it their lifelong quest to collect every children’s series and set them in NYC in the form of a feature film… while doing little to nothing with the characters and their stories. They struck twice with The Smurfs live-action films, then again earlier this year with Tom & Jerry. Now they’ve done it with Clifford the Big Red Dog. I have nothing against NYC because I live here, but seeing so many live-action films based on children’s series dump familiar characters in the city so they can raise antics is so exhausting, especially when they already have fictional settings that exist within the source material. Clifford comes off as an exercise of redundant slapstick and gross-out dog jokes set within the city rather than a proper adaptation that explores the love between Emily Elizabeth and Clifford.
I gave credit to the first act, which makes you sympathize with E.E., but when Clifford turns big in the span of one night, the film takes a major decline in quality. It becomes an endless series of chaotic mayhem caused by the big red dog with Emily Elizabeth and Casey trying to cover everything up. The movie mostly explores the relationship between the kid and her estranged uncle rather than her dog that she immediately risks everything for in a day. The titular 10-foot dog becomes discarded as a MacGuffin to keep the plot in motion, most importantly when he becomes the target of an owner of an animal genetics company (Tony Hale) who wants him for their products. The story moves down the children's live-action IP checkbox and does every generic and unfunny joke known to man to garner laughs from its young audience, including character destroying a penthouse, gross-out jokes about pee and butts, random slapstick, the whole nine yards.
The movie leaves no room for audiences to breathe, for it’s hastily paced as if it was edited by a trailer house who doesn’t understand the definition of the word “continuity.” The movie’s editing comes across like a rough draft due to every cut being so jarringly choppy, where the majority of the shots in its composition are inserts and close-ups of the characters who (most of the time) don’t even look like they occupy the same space as the CG dog. This makes no sense because the BTS photos that leaked a few years ago show a 10-foot skeleton of the model. But when put into action, this movie that was filmed within two months makes it look like it was done within a week with no time or consideration for reshoots.
If that’s not bad enough, the CGI is also frighteningly inconsistent. Clifford features a caveat of unpolished and downright terrible CGI that feels straight out of the early 2000s and looks more suitable for television than a big screen. There’s some fine detailing and texture on the dog himself, but his photorealistic design and wonky movement are nightmarish. Don’t even get me started on the non-Clifford CG assets that involve him getting into hijinks with real people. What you see in the trailer, terrible CGI and all, is the final result. How does something as old as Stuart Little look more effective than a 2021 release?!
There was potential for a good adaptation here and while it might amuse a very young demographic, Clifford the Big Red Dog is rote, recycling lazily constructed ideas, undercut by poor direction and terrible editing with little to no form of continuity, and has regressive CGI that makes you cringe. It’s another terrible live-action film adaptation that proves some properties should simply be left alone. Now watch the studio pull a Smurfs and make a completely CG animated Clifford movie a few years down the line as if this is what they should’ve done in the first place.
