Review: Top Dog (1995)

Another year, another Oscar Bet Loss. Took me a little longer than planned to check this one out, mostly cause I straight up forgot about it, but jimmy, if you’re reading this, I got it you cunt.

I’d never heard of Top Dog before it was thrown at my face like a fucking wet rag, but the phrase ‘Chuck Norris Cop Comedy... With A Dog!’ told me I was probably gonna hate it. And once again my unrecognised powers of foresight prove correct as Top Dog turned out to be one of the lamest, most clichéd, unfunny, nonsensical excuses for a comedy I’ve seen since Jack & Jill. This is legitimately in the running for one of the most boring films I’ve had the misfortunate to suffer through.

The film opens with veteran officer Lou Swanson and his Canine partner Reno arriving at the scene of an apartment bombing, Lou sees two men who match descriptions of suspects seen running away from the apartment before it exploded, so with nothing to go on except a gut instinct, Lou follows the men, stakes out their hideout, and goes in for the investigation without calling for back-up, and of course Lou and Reno get shot with Lou dying from his injuries.

With no-one else to turn to – even though there’s an entire department to turn to – Police Captain Callahan (not Harry but his Asian cousin Ken) choose maverick loose cannon Chuck Norris to take over the case and teams him up with Reno, but Chuck Norris is a lone wolf, he hates everyone and everything and doesn’t need teaming up with no man, woman, animal, vegetable or mineral.

But the two of them reluctantly team up and investigate the scene of Lou’s death, which seems to be enough of a motivation for the villains - group of White Supremacist assholes, it’s a whole thing – to try and assassinate Chuck and Reno at Chuck’s home, it turns out to be a massive waste of time and stupid roundhouse kicks but it kicks off the whole bombing plot that’s suppose to be the film’s main drive but we keep getting distracted by the film yelling at us to LOOK HOW FUCKING FUNNY THE DOG IS!

I’ve yet to see a film more schizophrenic than this, on the one hand you have a terrorist plot revolving around Trump Voters wanting to kill all minorities because “Fuck the darkies” while on the other you have a dog playing dress-up, and that’s not a euphemism, they literally pause the movie for five minutes to let the dog play dress-up. Things just happen, conclusion are jumped to, characters come in and out of the fucking movie with nary a goodbye, there’s no narrative flow to make any sense of this or why racial terrorists are part of a family friendly Dog-Cop movie, it’s too safe for hard-core Chuck Norris fans but too uncomfortable for family viewings.

Speaking of characters who wander in and out the film like a bunch of retarded schoolchildren looking for the toilet, let’s rattle them off shall we? We had Captain Callahan, Chuck’s superior who kept going on about how he’s running for mayor, Detective Savannah Boyette who contributed about as much to the film as a retarded schoolchild, Matthew Swanson, grandson to Lou, who WAS a retarded schoolchild and I’m still struggling to understand why the film had to shove a kid into the film with no character, no plot relevance and no fucking point of existence.

Also there were bad guys, they didn’t have names and they were racist, let’s fucking move on.

Chuck Norris played by Chuck Norris was as schizophrenic as the film was, they kept trying to paint him as this loose cannon bad-ass who hates everyone and while occasionally they did remember that, for the most part he was relatively friendly, often subdued and kinda neutered, by both the PG rating and his own ineptitude. How in the fuck did the internet decide Chuck Norris deserves Universal Bad-Ass Rating, he can’t even pretend to play Bad-Ass.

And the dog’s a dog, he has no character, no arc, he exists to be a problem, much like Chuck he’s called a Hero Dog but when the time comes to prove it he ignores every order, every cry for help, every police dog instinct, except for the final act when he needs to be Dog-Cop to save the day and it’s no longer funny.

Not that it ever was funny.

Direction from Aaron Norris - Chuck’s younger brother who seems to be throwing Aaron a bone by letting him direct a bunch of his flicks – is to put it gently... piss-poor. For an action comedy there’s absolutely fucking nothing of either, the comedy consists almost entirely of Chuck calling Reno a mutt, Reno making Chuck look like an idiot, lather, rise, repeat till nausea, it’s literally 80 minutes of the same one joke told in different dresses, aside from the aforementioned Doggy Dress-Up scene which comes from nowhere and goes nowhere, that is the extent of the humour in this comedy.

As for the action, what action? Much like the comedy it’s the same thing repeated and repeated and repeated, it’s always two groups of people shooting at each other and we see one group shoot, then it cuts to the other group shooting, then back to the first group shooting, nobody actually moving, nobody flanking or doing leaps through the air with John Woo Doves shooting out their ass, just being perfectly still behind cover and shooting with occasionally the bad guys getting shot and flying backwards in slow-motion only to have something break their fall because this is a family film.

A family film with fucking racist terrorists but who am I to judge.

I haven’t even touched upon the idiotic decision making – like how two terrorists at a check-point decide that the best way to avoid suspicion is the floor it and run like hell – but I honestly couldn’t give less of a fuck. I’ve written over 1000 words about this film which is over 1000 more than anyone should. This film isn’t just bad it’s dull, bland, boring and torturously so, it fails on every genre it’s trying to emulate, the story is too intense but too safe all at the same time, Chuck is the only actor giving anything to work with and he’s out-performed by the dog.

Leave it, ignore, go back to the happier times when you didn’t know this existed and be thankful for it.

3/10