Marmaduke Parent Guide

The Winslow family have a problem: their Great Dane, Marmaduke (Pete Davidson), is too big, too unruly, and has too much of an appetite. But when a champion dog trainer (Brian Hull) lays eyes on Marmaduke he sees more than just a problem, he sees his next big challenge. Is Marmaduke capable of being trained or is he destined to be destructive forever?

I’m a straightforward kind of person, so let’s cut right to the chase. This is an awful movie. For the first 40 or so minutes I didn’t like it, but it was harmless enough that I could see it providing bland entertainment for young viewers. Then the film decided to take a sharp turn into offensive ethnic stereotypes and I lost even that small glimmer of hope. Do not watch this movie. Do not let your children watch this movie. Let it die buried under the mountain of content that is Netflix.

I appreciate, and am an advocate for, stylized animation. In this case, however, the animators decided that making their animation look as cheap and juvenile as possible was a good artistic choice. I’ve seen PlayStation 2 games with better rendering than this. Today I curse fate that I was born with eyeballs and had to behold this monstrosity. The voice acting isn’t much better. Pete Davidson and David Koechner are fine, but everyone else sounds like they’re doing the English dub for a low budget anime production. Even J.K. Simmons is obviously phoning it in, and I’ve never not liked him in anything. The writing is poor, the story makes no sense, and half the “jokes” either involve farts or getting hit in the groin.

Let’s dive into the even worse aspects of this production. At about the halfway mark of the runtime I was thinking to myself “this is awful, but it’s harmless so I could see young kids enjoying it”. Then the racial stereotypes started. A dog from China shows up who speaks only in wise proverbs, does kung-fu, and has magical powers. “Mystical powers of the East” is a quote from this movie. A human person in the year of our Lord 2022 wrote that down and thought it was a good idea. The level of Orientalism in this production is so high I’m convinced they had a time traveler from the 19^th century on the writing staff. The Asian stereotypes are the most obvious, but there’s also a smattering of Mexican stereotypes in there as well just to mix it up.

Obviously, this film (and I’m using that term generously) should not be viewed by anyone of any age for many reasons. Marmaduke feels like a harbinger of the inevitable and imminent downfall of Netflix. Maybe Blockbuster will buy them out?