My 7 yr old daughter persuaded me to watch this film with her last week. I was expecting to see a film that had some relevance to the reason the dog is famous in the first place i.e. the fact that it's a dancing dog. Although there were some scenes that featured Pudsey dancing & standing on his hind legs etc they were very much shoehorned into the script almost as an after thought & bore very little relevance to the story at all.
So why make a movie staring Pudsey the dog? The answer of course is very simple. If you are a singer & a star on BGT you can of course go on to make lots of money selling CD's & performing at live concerts. Pudsey the dog, even though he may have been taken to the hearts of the nation, is very much a one trick pony. So someone had the bright idea to cash in while he's still famous & stick him in a movie.
To be honest I did enjoy the start of the film, which has quite a few funny, if not particularly original scenes. I also enjoyed pointing out to my daughter the rear number plate on the white trailer, which is absent when the family set off on their journey, but manages to appear & disappear several times on the way. ( one for the Robert Webb show there).
Unfortunately after this the film takes a bit of a nose dive into a sentimental mishmash of Lassie, meets Babe, meets Nanny McPhee & the big bang, meets 101 Dalmatians. These were of course, with the possible exception of Lassie, all very good movies. (In fact I'm not ashamed to admit I was filling up at the end the Nanny McPhee & the big bang.) This however is not a good film.
So what's wrong with it then I hear you ask? Well it's certainly not the acting. In fact John Sessions puts in a very good performance as the pantomime villain. And Pudsey is, well, just Pudsey. The problem is the script. It is written by a guy called Paul Rose who as far as I can see from his page on this site hasn't actually written a film script before. What he has done is scripts for children's TV shows such as Dani's Castle, My Parents are Aliens & Sooty. Shows which are basically a series of quick fire gags. Maybe if there had been enough money in the kitty to employ the talents of George Miller (Babe)or Emma Thompson there might have been a different result.
My daughter, who quite enjoyed the film, asked me to explain to her what was so wrong with it. I told her that when she has seen as many films as I have & has something to compare it with, she might be a bit more critical. But maybe I am missing the point. Because if you're a 7 year old who can watch back to back episodes of You've Been Framed & laugh at people falling over again & again & again then maybe this film is just what you want to see.
