Review: Strays – fabulously crude, surprisingly sweet

It’s quite some achievement – that a film so gleefully and gratuitously crude could also be quite so sweetly touching. But director Josh Greenbaum and his starry cast, none of whom of course we actually see, pull it off hilariously and indeed poignantly.

There is some remarkable computer work going on. You very soon get used to the fact that you are in the company of a bunch of talking dogs, presumably because these are dogs with plenty to say.

We start with the relentlessly cheerful Border Terrier Reggie (voiced by Will Ferrell), a dog so totally convinced that every day is the best day ever that he is completely blind to the fact that his ghastly, oafish owner Doug (Will Forte) is spitting venom at him. When Doug drives him for hours and dumps him, Reggie is convinced that it’s the best game of fetch ever. And then the day comes when Reggie really can’t find his way back. Instead, becoming a stray himself, he falls in with a colourful bunch of established strays – the potty-mouthed Boston Terrier Bug (Jamie Foxx); Hunter (Randall Park), an anxious Great Dane who’s freaked out by his work as a therapy dog; and Maggie (Isla Fisher), an Australian Shepherd whose been dumped by her owner in favour of a cute little puppy.

Bug gushes his love for his life on the street and LOLs at Reggie’s naïve insistence than Doug is the best owner ever. Soon enough the penny drops and Reggie, against all his previous instincts, finds himself intent on a rather colourful revenge. He is going to bite off the bit of Doug’s anatomy that Doug himself loves the most. Except, of course, Reggie and the gang don’t express it quite as nicely as that. The film becomes a quest to unravel the journey back to Doug’s house, with plenty of adventures along the way, including a swooping bird of prey, getting caught up in the plight of a missing girl guide and just generally having sex with anything they can find, from sofas to garden gnomes while weeing everywhere, either to denote ownership or simply to underline their new-found friendship.

The jail scene is a hoot. The keys to their freedom are just tantalisingly out of reach, but they delude themselves into thinking that if they arouse the Great Dane sufficiently he might just be able to reach the keys in a way you really wouldn’t want to actually see. When they finally do make their escape, it’s engineered in the grossest way imaginable, totally in keeping with a film which never misses the chance to be absolutely foul – and yet still manages to tug at a few heartstrings as Reggie jettisons the notion of ownership in favour of genuine friendship. Meanwhile, Great Dane and Aussie shepherd dog are developing – amid all the crudity – the sweetest little romance. And the revenge when it comes? Well, it’s delicious to watch and also awful to watch. There are no holds barred in Strays, a film which really does manage to merge the most appalling rudeness with the most appealing sweetness into a thoroughly enjoyable 93 mins in the cinema.