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 MARLEY AND ME: THE PUPPY YEARS |
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| Featuring: Travis Turner, Donnelly Rhodes, Merrilyn Gann, Chelah Horsdahl, Sydney Imbeau |
| Director: Michael Damian |
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Studio: 20th Century Fox |
| DVD release: 16 August 2011 |
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Runtime: 86 min.
(1 disc) |
| Format: Widescreen, Color, Dolby, Blu-ray |
| DVD features: 1080p High Definition, Aspect ratio 1.78:1, Audio tracks (DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 - English), Subtitles (English SDH, French, Spanish), Marley and Me: The Puppy Years Goes to Training Camp, Part of the Family, My Favorite Moments
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The original Marley and Me was a touching story of a family's life with a beloved pet. The dog was rambunctious and arguably the world's worst dog.
The Puppy Years claims to show us a summer in the life of Marley when he is living with the nephew of his owners. Fine. That can work if you can't get Owen Wilson and Jennifer Aniston back for a sequel. They take a formula that Disney has had success with before by making a direct to video sequel of a popular film and trivializing it with goofy bad guys and talking animals.
The Puppy Years is so much like the Air Buddies series that, without a title in place, one finds himself looking for distinctive characteristics of the Air Buddies in the cute little labs that frolic around this film.
Bodi (Travis Turner) is watching Marley while his parents are on assignment elsewhere in the world. In turn, Bodi is staying with his grandpa (Donnelly Rhodes) while his mother is at a conference. Bodi has trouble with follow-through and wants a puppy of his own. In order to convince his mother that he can finish a project and to let him have a dog, Bodi decides to turn Marley into an upstanding citizen by the time his mother comes back.
The national puppy obstacle course challenge event coming up soon will be the perfect structure for Marley's transformation. The filmmakers seemed to forget that Marley was absolutely untrainable in the original film, and therefore should not have been the least bit trainable in this one. Never mind, there's money to be made.
I've seen this film twice, and it is not objectionable for the most part (though whoring out the Marley and Me story for this kind of thing is not easily forgiven). If your kids (or you) like the Air Buddies films, they'll probably like this one, though the original may not be appropriate for them.
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