By Bob Garver<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cCats & Dogs 3: Paws Unite\u201d is an experiment in how bad a movie can be while still staying completely harmless. There\u2019s nothing \u201coffensive\u201d here, no bad messages or dangerous philosophies or seriously objectionable material. I suppose the \u201crude humor\u201d that earns the movie a PG rating isn\u2019t exactly tasteful, but I can\u2019t imagine parents thinking that this movie actually crosses any sort of line. For all intents and purposes, this movie is completely fine for children, and yet they shouldn\u2019t watch it because it is unoriginal garbage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The film takes place in a world where cats and dogs moonlight as secret agents while their owners are away. They do this to keep rogue cats and dogs in check so humans don\u2019t stop loving them. This includes making sure cats and dogs don\u2019t fight with one another (even though they really want to) because humans find that particularly off-putting. Roger the Dog (Max Greenfield) and Gwen the Cat (Melissa Rauch) work in surveillance, but are forced into field roles once a plague of cat-and-dog fighting starts sweeping the neighborhood. They learn that a character voiced by George Lopez is behind a wave of brainwashings, but what kind of cat or dog sacrifice humans\u2019 affection for their own kind just to destroy their affection for the other? The answer is the kind that isn\u2019t a cat or a dog. Pablo the Parrot (Lopez) is trying to take out both types of popular pets so humans will be steered toward buying \u201cother\u201d pets like him. He operates out of a pet store alongside a lizard, a tarantula, snakes, frogs, but not fish. Fish don\u2019t count.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The movie can\u2019t possibly fill 84 minutes with an elaborate spy story, so it throws in subplots about Roger and Gwen\u2019s teenage human owners. Roger\u2019s owner Max (Callum Seagram Airlie) is a tennis prodigy with an overbearing mother (Kirsten Robek) whose game is beginning to suffer under the weight of his crushing training schedule. Gwen\u2019s owner Zoe (Sarah Giles) is an aspiring musician whose floundering musician father is about to get them evicted from their apartment over his inability to pay the rent. I might feel more sympathetic toward the father if he wasn\u2019t shown to have a staggeringly poor work ethic in other areas of his life. This is a guy who doesn\u2019t even bother to heat up frozen food. And he waits until he\u2019s been served with an eviction notice to even look for a non-music job. I felt sorry for Zoe, not because she\u2019s might have to move to a building that doesn\u2019t allow pets, but because she has this deadbeat for a father.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Roger and Gwen notice that their humans are in a funk, so they decide that the best way to solve each of their problems is to get them together. This leads to a tired \u201ctrapped in an elevator\u201d storyline where the two teens learn that they need to get off their phones and pay more attention to the world around them. That\u2019s a noble message, and so is the emphasis on courage and teamwork. The problem is that these inspirational themes are buried in a movie that is itself embarrassingly uninspired.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cCats & Dogs 3: Paws Unite\u201d is little more than an overlong string of bathroom jokes. It doesn\u2019t even mine the rich subject of dog and cat behavior for jokes that often because that would get in the way of the bathroom jokes. To my understanding it has almost nothing in common with the previous two installments of this series, which I haven\u2019t seen, but I know came out 19 and 10 years ago, respectively. Even if those movies were good, the target audience of little kids is aging out of this franchise between sequels. Then again, the target audience of little kids is hopefully too mature to enjoy this movie, which is too dumb for anybody.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Grade: D<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cCats & Dogs 3: Paws Unite\u201d is available On Demand through online streaming and likely through your local cable provider. The film is rated PG for rude humor. Its running time is 84 minutes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By Bob Garver \u201cCats & Dogs 3: Paws Unite\u201d is an experiment in how bad a movie can be while still staying completely harmless. There\u2019s nothing \u201coffensive\u201d here, no… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":47356,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[108],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47355"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47355"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47355\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/47356"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47355"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47355"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47355"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}