Movie review 'Max': Dogs of war

Cast:  Josh Wiggins, Dejon LaQuake, Thomas Haden Church, Robbie Amell, Lauren Graham, Luke Kleintank, Jay Hernandez, Miles Mussenden, Mia Xitlali, Joseph Julian Soria

Director: Boaz Yakin

Rating: Two and a half stars

Kyle Wincott (Robbie Amell) is a handler to a military dog called Max. While serving a tour of duty in Afghanistan, Kyle, Max and his patrol conduct a dubious mission that results in Kyle’s death.

This tragedy badly upsets his family in Texas but it peculiarly affects Max. Kyle’s younger brother Justin (Josh Wiggins), who has an estranged relationship with his father (Thomas Haden Church), becomes Max’s handler. Along with his friend Carmen (Mia Xitlali), Justin trains Max and heals him, while at the same time stumbling into a mystery about the nature of his brother’s death.

Max, by Boaz Yakin, (director of Remember the Titans) is the kind of movie that seems to come from the ’90s. The “boy and animal movie”, like Free Willy and Beethoven, has become somewhat outdated by the turn of the century where the family comedy film has to a large degree been usurped by superhero films. Yakin’s Max is kind of similar to the feel of those simpler forms of movies but with a premise updated to 21st century concerns. Max is simultaneously a suburban teenage coming-of-age story, about a boy becoming a man, finding his first girlfriend, getting his father’s respect and about the trauma of America’s involvement in Afghanistan. To the film’s credit, the introduction of the heavy elements dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder, the fact that corrupt soldiers use their military service as a front to work as arms dealers for Mexican cartels, somehow manages to work in the fabric of a larger theme without quite overwhelming the boy and dog story. This blend shouldn’t work, but that it manages to do so, to the extent the film does, is to its credit.

Movies with animal characters, that is to say live-action movies, are always a hard proposition because it is very difficult to make an animal a believable character, without lapsing to anthropomorphism (where the animal takes on human attributes and skills). The trick is for an animal to be an animal but at the same time develop, change and grow the way a human character does. Among the movies that solve this problem is Steven Spielberg’s underrated War Horse, as well as White Dog, a much darker film dealing with the attempts of animal trainer to deprogram dogs conditioned to trauma. Max doesn’t have the dog behave in a manner widely divergent from recognised animal behaviour. It also avoids the sentimentality of such stories by ensuring that the dog never gets “character scenes”. Every scene with the dog has him interact with other characters and, all his actions and interactions are observed by humans. This smarter approach is to the film’s credit, though even then it doesn’t shy from such impossible scenes such as a dog’s sense of smell following a trail across a small lake, something that should logically rub away any traces.

The human characters aren’t entirely overwhelmed but they nonetheless struggle with the material. Justin is simply not very likable. This is partly the point since the movie is about his maturity and growing responsibility, but this aspect comes from the plot more than any skill on the part of the actor. Dejon LaQuake and Mia Xitlali are much better. Thomas Haden Church is wasted in a very slight part, Lauren Graham who plays the hero’s mother is a highly warm presence and she gets the film’s big crowd-pleasing line.

The film has a few action scenes that are well shot, though on the whole the opening sequence of the dog on the front line in Afghanistan was much more tense and suspenseful than the later scenes. Ultimately, I can’t help feeling that Max would have been more interesting if the story focused on a dog on field duty or on a battlefield. The approach taken by the film does make Max an unusual family film, but it also makes sure that it remains despite its interesting premise, a highly conventional one.

The writer is programmer, Lightcube Film Society