After seeing MGM's family comedy Good Boy!, I'm thankful dogs haven't really mastered the ability to speak English yet. From the looks of this flick, canines are as starved for a decent joke as most humans are.

Good Boy! relates the story of Owen (Liam Aiken), a regular kid who's trying to earn money by walking the neighborhood dogs on a daily basis. Why does he need money? He wants to buy his own pooch, of course. Then one day, Owen encounters a little stray. He adopts the critter and names it Hubble. Hubble seems unusually smart for a dog, following the usual commands with suspicious precision and promptness. Owen eventually discovers that Hubble is no ordinary dog, and neither are any of the world's canine population.

As it turns out, dogs were sent to Earth thousands of years ago to conquer the planet, only they ended up as man's best friend instead of man's master. Hubble (voiced by Matthew Broderick) has been sent from Sirius, the "home star," to check up on progress and is shocked to see how lazy dogs have allowed themselves to become. He enlists the help of Owen, who can now actually hear dogs talk after a malfunction with one of Hubble's devices. The mission? Get the dogs into shape before their ruler arrives for final inspection. In return, Owen ends up showing Hubble the importance of dogs to humans, how they provide companionship to one another. The boy and dog form a loving bond that will have kids laughing and adults retching.

Some family films forget they're supposed to deliver entertainment for the whole family. Most such movies make the mistake of setting out to please only the children, leaving the parents accompanying them wishing they had stayed home. Good Boy! perpetrates this cinematic crime by aiming so low on the entertainment age spectrum that the only viewers who enjoy the flick may be the ones young enough to get in free. 

Okay, this movie is not as horrendously dumb as Kangaroo Jack. And I sensed a smart, fun fable crying to break out of Good Boy!. Too bad those cries were muffled beneath the second-rate screenplay and tired poop jokes. The filmmakers haven't made the slightest effort to set their film apart from the cutesy animal movies already out there. Instead of treading new ground with its potentially fun story, Good Boy! continues on the beaten path, incorporating the same computer-animated mouths that give dogs speech (with a vocal cast of celebrities who don't sound too thrilled to be a part of this venture either), the same dull human characters who wonder how the dogs can take off into the sky while chasing a ball, and the same inane subplots that provide nothing but padding to the running time.

On that last point, here's an example. If a movie absolutely must have bullies poking fun of the main character, at least give them a good excuse. The kids who pick on Owen have no apparent motive; they seem to be there to give the writers something to build another lame comedic sequence or two around (I'm also puzzled as to why the nice girl who becomes Owen's friend hangs out with these jerks in the first place).

When it comes to story and screenplay, Good Boy! is as lazy as Hubble thinks the dogs have become. On the other
hand, as I mentioned before, the little ones might enjoy this film immensely. When the movie works on their level, it delivers a decent story that's not too challenging or intelligence-insulting for a six-year-old. Still, when Good Boy! forgets that parents are also in the theatre, the film slips up. Any movie managing to sneak in  references to both The King and I and Caddyshack  should be better than this one ends up being. 

Yes, the dogs are cute, but the humans voicing them and those acting around them don't seem to be exhibiting much energy. Aiken eeks by as the film's hero, and Carl Reiner tries hard while voicing the old pooch Shep, but "Saturday Night Live" alums Kevin Nealon and Molly Shannon waste their talents as Owen's parents, Broderick sounds bored as Hubble, and Brittany Murphy, doing the voice behind a shaky little dog named Nelly, proves to be just as irritating in dog form as she was as a human in Uptown Girls.

Unlike the Baha Men song, I know who let this dog out. MGM's Good Boy! is a simple family feature that doesn't need a huge budget to get its point across. However, little originality and spark emerge to get the film's premise going. In the end, Good Boy! looks every bit as cheap as it must have been to make.

MY RATING: * 1/2 (out of ****)

(Released by MGM and rated "PG" for mild crude humor.)

Review also posted on www.ajhakari.com.