Peter Bradshaw 

Red Dog – review

The real world has been PG-ified in this well-meaning tale of a dog's adventures in a Western Australian mining community, writes Peter Bradshaw
  
  

Red Dog
Doggy story for humans … Red Dog. Photograph: PR

Is it a children's story for adults? Or an adult's story for children? Well, it's a doggy story for humans, anyway: an avowedly true-life tale that comes across like a well-meaning PG-certification of the real world. Red Dog is a Greyfriars-Bobby-type story from a remote mining community in Western Australia: the dog in question went on a legendary, heartrending quest to find his master who had died in an accident – the dog was said to have journeyed thousands of miles before coming home, and was the subject of a 2001 novel by Louis de Bernières on which this film is based. Josh Lucas plays John Grant, an American who adopts Red Dog; Noah Taylor plays Jack Collins, the local barkeep, and there is a gallery of tough mine-workers who turn out to have hearts of gold. The actual journey of Red Dog takes up disconcertingly little of the film: the rest is concerned with his legendary and unreal-sounding adventures in this remote community.

 

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