Dog review – Channing Tatum’s directorial debut makes for a surprisingly spiky ride

Though there is an undeniably simplicity to the elevator pitch of Dog – Channing Tatum, cute animal, road trip – this star vehicle really isn’t what it appears to be on the surface. What looked from the trailer like a weepy for pet lovers instead reveals itself to be closer to an oddball sketch show, bouncing from side-story to side-story on a bumpy ride down America's Pacific Coast Highway.

Tatum, who also goes behind the camera for the first time as co-director alongside Reid Carolin, plays Jackson Briggs, a retired Army Ranger (with a name cribbed directly from Mortal Kombat for some reason). Suffering from a brain injury, Briggs is down on his luck, working at a Subway-esque sandwich shop, waiting on a recommendation letter from his old company commander that will land him a job working in private security.

To get this letter, though, Briggs has to take on one last army job – transport combat dog Lulu (an adorable Belgian Malinois) to the funeral of her handler Riley Rodriguez, an old Ranger buddy who died smashing his car into a tree after getting home from deployment. With the dog too anxious to get on a plane, Briggs has to drive Lulu 1,500 miles from the snowy northern reaches of Washington State to a military cemetery in New Mexico, inevitably falling in love with the animal along the way.

Whilst the basic building blocks of this story hold few surprises – as Briggs bonds with Lulu and adjusts to her post-combat neuroses, so too can he work on his own trauma in a way that feels very familiar – the path from start to end is a circuitous one. In each new city and state, Briggs and Lulu hop out of Briggs’s truck and get into some sort of misadventure, whether it’s being taken prisoner on a weed farm, encounters with racist cops, or even Briggs being invited for a tantric three-way in Portland.

It makes for a real mishmash of tones, raunchy comedy bumping up against family-friendly animal drama in a way that often threatens to knock Dog off its axis. It’s a problem that Tatum the director can’t quite keep a lid on, so it’s very fortunate that he has Tatum the actor there to help him out. He gives a very charming lead performance, his unique brand of bemusement in the face of the unfamiliar keeping an otherwise rather flimsy whole together. You might not believe in every individual situation, but you always believe Briggs’s response to it, a testament to Tatum’s superb, yet still often underrated, star power.

Where the script does find steadier footing is in both the Briggs-Lulu relationship (you’ll absolutely fall in love with them as a pair by the time the credits roll) and in its study of retired veterans. It’s clearly a community Tatum and Carolin spent a lot of time with before making Dog, lending an authenticity to Briggs’s dialogue, especially around fellow vets, that make his world feel that much more lived in, a world in which sentimentality is only welcome in short bursts.

Outside of the last 15 minutes, Dog isn’t the easy-going family watch you might have assumed from the marketing, but in taking a bolder, weirder road, Tatum ends up with something messier but also far more memorable.

Dog is now in UK cinemas.