Dog Man

Writer-director Peter Hastings' Dog Man, based on a deliberately primitive comic-within-a-comic from Dav Pilkey's Captain Underpants series, comes on like Paul Verhoeven's RoboCop but (explicitly, this time) for children. Officer Knight and Greg the Dog are the law in a marzipan city that is constantly under threat from Pete Davidson's aimlessly evil ginger cat Petey. After coming a cropper during a bomb defusal, thanks in part to Greg the Dog's colour blindness, what's left of Knight and his canine friend is sown together to create the mute but energetic title character. Although the primary dramatic knot in Dog Man belongs to Petey and his clone kitten Li'l Petey, as they slowly undo the despairing self-image that has been passed down to them by an indifferent parent, Hasting's film doesn't shy away from suggesting the horror experienced by the chimeric Dog Man, even if such interludes are largely played for laughs. As well as echoing Omni Consumer Product's fragrant disregard for bodily autonomy, Hastings' Dog Man movie also steers its subject back to their former residence, to mourn a failed relationship and recall the happier times both components of this new composite identity experienced in a now hollowed-out household. In that respect Dog Man wields the same kind of power as a vintage The Simpsons episode: this is homage deployed with an intent that goes beyond just absurdist reproduction, managing to retain some, prickly remnant of real human sentiment.