AIR BUD (Disney) Starring: Michael Jeter, Kevin Zegers, Wendy Makkena, Bill Cobbs. Screenplay: Paul Tamasy and Aaron Mendelsohn. Producers: William Vince and Robert Vince. Director: Charles Martin Smith. MPAA Rating: PG (mild profanity) Running Time: 99 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
In an early scene from AIR BUD, young Josh Framm (Kevin Zegers), a fatherless and friendless boy in an idyllic suburban neighborhood, rolls a ball into some bushes and is startled when something rolls the ball back to him. Josh leaves a trail of sweet treats to lure his mysterious companion into the open, whereupon emerges...a squat little extraterrestrial with a telescoping neck.
Well, actually, it's a sweet-tempered dog, recently escaped from his nasty owner, an inept clown named Norm Snively (Michael Jeter). Even though the owner doesn't care enough about the dog to name him, he still shows up to claim his property once he realizes the boy has his dog. The boy refuses to give up his new friend, however, because he has come to love...the little beagle named Shiloh.
Well, actually, it's a golden retriever named Buddy. From the trailers and promotions for AIR BUD, you might be expecting a rambunctious sports comedy about a bad-team-made-good in the recent Disney tradition, with a hoops-playing pooch leading a basketball team to victory -- sort of THE MIGHTY DOGS. With a few token exceptions, it's nothing of the kind. Screenwriters Paul Tamasy and Aaron Mendelsohn want AIR BUD to be a touching story of a lonely boy and his dog, something warm but slow-paced, something decidedly _not_ THE MIGHTY DOGS.
Given the formulaic drivel Disney usually passes off as live action entertainment, that noble goal alone should have made AIR BUD worth supporting. Unfortunately, two cosmically bad decisions gummed up the works. The first of these you can chalk up to Tamasy and Mendelsohn, who make the mistake of attempting to evoke the most beloved lonely boy and his dog story of recent years (Steven Spielberg's E. T.) while incidentally evoking the best lonely boy and his dog story of this year (the recent video debut SHILOH). Young Kevin Zegers is a decent enough actor, but he's fighting against some tough precedents when he tries to make his friendship with Buddy uniquely compelling, as well as fighting against Charles Martin Smith's languid direction.
The second mistake is purely the fault of Disney's marketing department, which will be luring unsuspecting kids and their parents to what they believe is going to be a slapstick comedy. Buddy's impressive basketball tricks might make a nice five-minute visit with Letterman or Leno, but they're not the stuff a feature film is made of. With the exception of one minor chase scene and the big basketball game finale (which features the ridiculous fiction -- and anyone who has ever been to a middle school basketball game will realize this -- of a middle school basketball game with a score in the 80s and a team which runs a pivot game reminiscent of Medowlark Lemon-era Globetrotters), AIR BUD is achingly slow. Twice as many children in the screening audience were roaming the aisles as were enraptured by the less-than-antic antics of Josh and Buddy.
It's tough to knock a family film which dares to avoid bodily function humor, but AIR BUD simply has no focus or direction, a fact made abundantly clear when the ridiculous basketball game finale gives way to an even more ridiculous courtroom finale. The custody battle for Buddy is even more of a chore to sit through than the rest of the film, and it does families the service of explaining to children that our legal system is based on dotty old judges with delusions of Solomonic wisdom. AIR BUD is really deserving of praise for only one reason: it's not what it's being sold as. Three cheers for the curative powers of false advertising.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 Buddy pictures: 3.
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