It isn’t funny.

It’s been nearly a month since the release of Strays and I’m pretty sure it’s safe to say that the film has been a big f failure. With a $46 million budget the film has grossed roughly $31 million in the box office and that’s about $47 million more than this film deserved to make. Add in marketing, and I saw trailers for this film everywhere, and I’m guessing this film is over $100 million in budget. It was directed by Josh Greenbaum and written by Dan Perrault.

Strays is dog shit. Its timing probably couldn’t be worse, coming out in the middle of the writer strike and economic downturn. As the first feature length film written by Dan Perrault and with studios losing billions of dollars already thanks to the strike, studio heads would be stupid to not use this as an excuse to purge its revenue losers. And no I’m not saying Perrault should be purged from Hollywood because of this one crappy adult comedy. I’m saying Will Ferrell should be.

Strays is another reminder  about how creatively bankrupt the adult comedy genre is. Like most of its brethren it is a one-tricky pony whose trick isn’t anything of value. Take a thing that doesn’t normally say the fuck word and talk about sex and drugs, and have it say the fuck word and talk about sex and drugs. Wanna see multiple scenes where dogs talk about screwing a couch, drink beer, get high on mushrooms, and talk a lot about penises? Wanna see a really awkward scene where a dog gets a boner to try to knock the keys off a wall? No? This movie sucks.

Will Ferrell plays as Reggie, whose owner Doug (Will Forte) abandons him in the city. Reggie teams up with Bug (Jamie Foxx), Hunter (Randall Park), and Maggie (Isla Fisher) on a revenge mission to find Doug and bite his dick off for never saying Reggie was a good boy. Will Ferrell in a voice role reminds me how much of his humor relies on physical presence. Ferrell’s voice acting shows as much interest as a 12 year old reading out a book report on the history of canned green beans.

Unsurprisingly Jamie Foxx and Isla Fisher seemed to actually care about putting effort into their roles, and Randall Park probably did but I think he just talks like he’s half-asleep naturally. I am convinced most of these movies that have complete shitass concepts but big celebrity voice casts are just money laundering operations. In addition you have Rob Riggle, Josh Gad, Sofia Vergara, Greta Lee, Phil Morris and David Herman.

There were two points that made me laugh; the films sets up the “devil in the sky” throughout the movie, which turns out to be a billboard of a mailman, while the crew takes a solid half minute berating him. There’s also a pretty funny scene where Dennis Quaid as Dennis Quaid is a birdwatcher. He talks like a professional birdwatcher and then opens his book where we see every species is just labeled “bird.” So I know Dan Perrault understands the concept of a set up and payoff in movies, and if the film was mostly comprised of those types of jokes it might not have spectacularly failed at the box office.

Unfortunately two well thought out jokes can’t make up for a movie whose comedy revolves mostly around dogs shitting and swearing and Will Forte jacking off. And there’s a lot of scenes of Will Forte jacking off, and a smarter reviewer could talk about how this was an analogy for the writers room. Like Seth Rogen seems to have understood, I wish more aging Hollywood writers would come to understand that just showing someone smoking a bong on screen isn’t edgy anymore. Weed is to drugs what Pedialyte is to hard liquor these days. Most of your adult stoner audience from the 90s and early aughts is now snorting cocaine or Ritalin, you should update your comedy to match.

And of course it’s all wrapped up in a few vague moments of faux-heartfelt emotion about abusive relationships so the vultures writing for Roger Ebert’s corpse are fooled into thinking it has some value. Really hard sell in a movie that tries to justify a dog mauling a guy’s penis as a revenge story. Imagine a reverse story where Ferrell, Foxx, and Fisher set out on a mission to mutilate Sarah Silverman’s vagina because she was mean to a dog.

I’m going to tag on some points for the CG department working on the dogs. It wasn’t fantastic, but it was better than the movie deserved. Like Eight Crazy Nights.

Rating: D+