The Secret Life of Pets

RATING: B

Even though this is a premise I'm quite sure we've seen before in different forms, here's a movie answering the question of what your pets do when you're not at home. On an average day, for a dog, that can mean just staring at the door all day until your owner comes home. Or go throw a party. For a cat, it might mean tossing away the actual cat food and raiding the fridge. Or just being a lazy bum.

Of course, all of this can change when your owner brings home a new dog who's significantly bigger than you who immediately insists on taking your bed and all your food. And if you're a dog like Max, you feel the need to get rid of this competitor immediately, which of course ends up leading you on a crazy adventure in a plot that sounds quite a bit like Toy Story... until instead of meeting an animal abuser (because the equivalent of Sid in this movie would have been way too dark) we get a human-hating animal cult led by... Kevin Hart the Bunny (or Snowball). It's actually quite hilarious.

The premise of this movie is somewhat promising (if you look away from the fact that it rips off movies like Toy Story), but ultimately it's pretty thin. Much of it depends on the fact that all the owners are gone all day long apparently, as well as apparently being incredibly forgiving when they find a mess--instead of being forgiving but still putting them in a crate or something. And just some other unrealistic things in general, such as the single fastest Animal Control response team in history.

The biggest mistake the marketing department made was making this movie compete against the other big talking-animal movie of the year--Zootopia, which was way more sophisticated. This movie is not that at all. It's a mostly brainless comedy; and a pretty fun one at that. We get plenty of Looney Tunes-esque slapstick violence that we don't get nearly enough of in today's animation. We get some amusing depictions of things pets do. We get plenty of Kevin Hart being Kevin Hart. And we get the single funniest interrogation scene of all time, courtesy of Gidget, the awesome (even if naïve) super tiny dog.

The Secret Life of Pets may not be the smartest animated movie of the year, but it's still quite fun in its own right, giving you just under 90 minutes of harmless comedy. If you're more demanding of a good story in a kids' movie because like many of us you've been spoiled by Pixar--or you're just not into the whole slapstick comedy thing--this one probably isn't for you. But for those who are open to this kind of material, go ahead and check it out; it might be a little more fun than you expected.