Review: It's a movie! It's a dud! It's Charlie the Wonderdog!

Something that definitely wasn't on my 2026 bingo card was Charlie the Wonderdog, the chipper new release from Viva Kids that's now in theaters, would have me getting misty in the first five minutes with an Up-esque "skipping through time" sequence. I'm a dog guy, always have been. When we got a dog as a kid, I was over the moon. When my husband and I got a dog five years ago, I was somehow even more over than moon than I was when I got a dog as a kid. 

"A boy and his dog" is such ripe cinematic territory to explore, and in its opening scenes, Charlie the Wonderdog tackles it beautifully. Young Danny receives puppy Charlie as a gift, and through the years, we see that friendship blossom, and become a bedrock of Danny's (and, obviously, Charlie's) life. They're always playing together, running around, lots of treats, lots of imagination. In a lot of their playtime, Danny imagines Charlie as a superhero, alongside whom he goes on epic adventures, jumping over lava pits and fighting bad guys, all that good stuff. So when, in the present day, we see Charlie as old, tired, unable to walk up the stairs to get into the house...yeah, it broke me. Dogs are so good, better than we deserve, but I'm so glad we get to share our lives with them.

And, as much as a mess as this movie is, I do like that one of its themes is: it's an honor and privilege to have a pet. If you're going to be abusive or neglectful, you don't deserve a furry friend (or a scaled or feathered one, at that). 

Charlie the Wonderdog clearly has its heart in the right place, and I think it'll work well for its target audience. There was an extremely young kid sitting in front of me at the theater who didn't make a peep the whole time, so I can only assume he was enraptured by it. At the end of the day, the movie largely delivers what it promises: there's a talking, flying dog doing all sorts of heroic feats, with plenty of laughs along the way. 

It's easy-breezy in its way, but it also feels like such a first draft of a movie. The movie flirts with having meaningful arcs to gives its characters depth and its story structure, but it never moves past flirting. Instead, it jumps around willy-nilly and feels like a bunch of scenes, rather than a narrative that has intention and anything resembling interiority. The stakes are so often life-and-death, and are so summarily and easily dealt with and basically forgotten about, that as the film progresses, the increasingly high stakes generate increasingly less tension. Obviously the hero is going to win at the end, but there's never even a fraction of a second where you wonder if he won't, which seems pretty key when you're telling a superhero story.

I can forgive the silliness of so many disasters happening in one spot. There's a giant pothole with a bus teetering on its edge, a plane falling out of a sky, a bomb threat at a museum. This small town is the epicenter of all of the world's dangers and woes, to an almost hysterical degree. But these scenes, which should feel like epic set pieces, just bop on by so quickly and lightly, the heroics almost feel like an afterthought.

Then there's the issue of the film's villain(s). You see, when Charlie has an encounter with aliens early in the film (that's where his powers come from), so does the neighbor's cat, Puddy, a known asshole who has always had it out for Charlie. While Charlie gains flight and strength and self-healing abilities, Puddy gains a suite of psychic powers that make him a dastardly foe indeed. Puddy is, simply, an extremely bland villain, with flat dialogue and an underwhelming voice performance bringing him to life. While Owen Wilson brings his signature charm to Charlie (he has a lot of voice work under his belt, after all), Puddy constantly feels awkward and lame. Every time we were in another scene focused on him, I sighed.

(It's also strange that, while Charlie's super-hearing allows him to pick up on emergencies happening many miles away, he never overhears Puddy's villainous scheming happening next door. But I digress.)

A much more colorful and interesting character who's a kind of second-fiddle frenemy is the President, who looks like a caricature of Hillary Clinton but whose behavior is decidedly Trumpian, right down to leveraging her office to make money. I'm not sure if this split between appearance and behavior is meant to make the character inoffensive to everyone, but I found the decision-making fascinating.

Similarly baffling are some of the "topical" jokes and asides the film pops in, which will surely cause it to age pretty roughly. There's a dog who identifies as a cat (a kind of sideways comment on the trans community...though it doesn't feel particularly hateful), a joke about AI, some stuff about cancel culture. You know, all of the jokes that little kids will eat up.

Perhaps the film's greatest sin is one I won't get into here, as it has to do with the ending. But it felt like another instance where there was a possibility of doing something emotionally impactful, narratively interesting, thematically resonant...and then the filmmakers decided to go the less interesting route for the sake of (presumably) making some sequels. Which, sure, that's how this business goes a lot of the time, but still disappointing to see.

Charlie the Wonderdog is pretty underwhelming, even to this dog lover's eyes, but for younger audiences, it might just soar. For me...I think the movie belongs in the dog house (and not like the cool hi-tech lair dog house).