Goofy with fun characters, but a stale story

Rating: 5/10 (23 March 2017)

Animated films changed forever when Pixar's "Toy Story" showed us what are toys are up to when we're not around. More than 20 years later, that tradition of storytelling continues in Illumination Entertainment's "The Secret Life of Pets," which applies the same concept to house pets (and who doesn't love talking animals). This "unseen world," however, has half the wit and imagination.
Animation storytellers have done an incredible job building intricate worlds in the same way sci-fi geniuses do, and the potential is certainly there for "Secret Life of Pets." This has yet to be Illumination's calling card, however. The "Despicable Me" films succeeded on clever slapstick and delightful characters. "Pets" has plenty of that to offer, but it runs out of steam after a point.
"Pets" follows Manhattan pup Max (Louis C.K.) whose life with owner Katie (Ellie Kemper) is turned upside-down when Katie brings home a big, clumsy rescue dog named Duke (Eric Stonestreet). The resentful Max tries to get Duke in trouble, and their cruel back-and-forth schemes result in both getting lost in the concrete jungle and in danger from a group of stray, abandoned animals.
Other than pointing out the similarities to the Woody-Buzz conflict in "Toy Story," I won't make any more comparisons, but the point is that the originality is sorely lacking. Some jokes contrasting real- life animal behaviors to personified animal behaviors stand out, like Chloe the lazy cat (Lake Bell) going ballistic when she sees a laser pointer – being wielded by fellow animals. Then there are the dogs in the park who make fun of an owner using a fetching stick. Writers Cinco Paul and Ken Dario of the "Despicable Me" films, and Brian Lynch, play with that range of humor really well, but aren't able to channel that creative energy into the plot.
The Max-Duke saga has a forgone conclusion from the very start, and the points along the way are not all that surprising aside from an incredibly strange diversion to a sausage factory. "Pets" redeems itself with its assortment of characters, some archetypal and some that defy expectation.
Jenny Slate's Gidget is one of the bigger hits; she plays a poodle with a crush on Max who rallies the neighborhood pets to find and save him, a subplot that's decidedly more interesting than the danger Max and Duke are in. Her relationship with a hawk voiced by Albert Brooks is refreshingly unusual, and Dana Carvey's Pops is one of few characters that keep us on our toes. Kevin Hart's cute-but- nasty bunny, Snowball, appears to be subversive of typical animated characters, but ultimately ends up being a token character in disguise. All in all, the interest level in "Pets" buoys based on which characters are on screen.
Illumination has a lot of work to do if it wants to enter the Pixar/Disney/DreamWorks echelon in more than just the box office sense. Its movies are fun and amusing, but everything that happens in "Pets" feels familiar and done three times before (like animals driving cars, which we saw not even a month earlier in "Finding Dory"). I have no issues with their films that knowingly stick to goofiness – nor with the ways this one does; they do it so well. But the premise of "The Secret Life of Pets" suggested something grander in style and scope that simply isn't there, and the story ultimately disappoints.
~Steven C
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