The thing about puppies is, they start out all small and cute and oh-so-adorable. Look at their puppy paws, way too big for their itty-bitty widdle bodies! Listen to their playful woofs and yips, as they tumble around and trip over themselves! Feel how fuzzy their rolly-polly bellies are, as you give the lil’ buddies an affectionate tummy scratch! Then they get older, and bigger, and more attuned to the interests of pets of a certain age. Biology starts to work its magic, as it does on all of God’s beautiful creatures. And the next thing you know, the family dog is frantically fucking grandma’s leg like like there’s no tomorrow.
Genndy Tartakovsky’s Fixed kicks off with this 0-to-60 mph progression, as a family brings home a baby bull terrier named, naturally, Bull. Cue a quick “Two years later” title card, and we find our hero en flagrante delecto with Nana’s varicose-veined calf. To say that the running commentary accompanying this animated pooch’s sexual encounter is pornographic would be putting it lightly; we’ll just note that Bull is extremely verbal. After being shoo-ed away by his owners before he’s reached a state of release, he then proceeds to have intimate relations with a cup of mint ice cream, a rubber ball, an umbrella, a purse, and a bowl of fruit. Finally, a garden hose gets turned on full-blast, and for better or worse, so does Bull.
You’re either laughing hysterically after reading that paragraph above or have the same look on your face that occurs when encountering spoiled milk. And that’s pretty much the either/or in terms of reactions to this. Tartakovsky is a bona fide legend in modern animation, but Samurai Jack this ain’t, and this attempt to outswim Adult Swim in terms of giddily obscene humor just feels like he binged all of Ren & Stimpy and Ralph Bakshi’s back catalog over a holiday weekend. It’s a gross-out comedy aimed specifically at folks who have calendars of dogs dressed up in human clothes, 12-year-old boys and/or PornHub addicts in equal measure. The fact that Netflix, who dropped this on its site today, didn’t let him call the movie Doggy Style may be the only sign of restraint here.
You can’t blame Bull (voiced by Adam Devine, who sounds like the only direction he was given was, “Do your best Jack Black impersonation”) for wanting to hump everything in sight. He’s a literal horndog. Nor can you blame him for harboring a crush on Honey (Kathryn Hahn), the queen-bitch Afghan hound who lives next door to him. They’ve been best friends since they were pups, and she sees the kind heart behind the raging hormones. Still, Bull doesn’t understand why Honey is so excited about taking part in a dog show, given that it’s so demeaning to their species. Don’t the judges just parade you around, then poke, prod and grope you? She has issues with that last verb: “They aren’t groping me,” she protests. “They are gently touching my body, then judging me on how it feels.”
Bull also runs with a pack of other neighborhood dogs, including an alpha boxer named Rocco (Idris Elba), a nerdy but socially ambitious dachshund named Fetch (Fred Armisen), and a catshit-eating beagle named Lucky (Bobby Moynihan). They spend their days sniffing butts and chasing balls. Speaking of balls: The gang spots one of their peers sporting a cone around his head. He’s just had a medical procedure done, see. And when the big guy turns around, everyone at the dog park notices that he’s conspicuously missing his cojones. Bulls shrieks in terror. He can’t imagine losing his prized possessions.
Then the bull terrier comes home later that afternoon, and starts to get suspicious about why his owners are acting uncharacteristically nice to him. It turns out that he is indeed scheduled to be neutered the next morning. So Bull does what any sensible, testicle-loving mutt would do. He gets the hell outta the house and heads for some imagined Shangri-La where he can perpetually fuck human legs in peace.
From here, Fixed turns into one castration-anxiety punch line and dick joke after another, and while we do love a good dick joke, the whole thing wears out its welcome way too quickly. The manic jazzbo score doesn’t help, even if it’s meant to subversively evoke vintage Hanna-Barbera cartoons, nor does the feeling that Tartakovsky and co-writers Steve Greenberg and Jon Vitti aren’t aiming for the funniest anthropomorphic gags so much merely plucking every low-hanging-fruit — pun 1000-percent intended in this case — in bulk. The closest thing to an imaginative set piece involves a kennel and the command to “Bellagio these fuckers,” which, yeah. Don’t ask. Meanwhile, you wonder if Dave Chappelle wrote the scenes involving an intersex Dobermann voiced by River Gallo.
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There’s also a love triangle involving Bull, Honey, and a snooty Borzoi (Beck Bennett) which is meant to gird all of the self-conscious raunchiness with rom-com sweetness, and somehow makes the whole affair feel even more phony and half-baked. Fixed should have been, by any measure, the fix we needed in terms of balls-out hilarity about neurotic, sex-crazed creatures, or even just a parable from an animation godhead about humans being just as beholden to animal instincts as our four-legged friends. Instead, we get a wildly uneven, totally obvious, and often painfully unfunny 80 minutes. It’s enough to drive you nuts.
From Rolling Stone US
