Alex may seem like a perfectly ordinary old man but the fact that he knows the whereabouts of a stolen $1 million fortune means he is more interesting than he seems. When the wicked Anja come to force him to reveal his secrets one way or another, Alex saves the details to a floppy disk, puts it on his dog PC and sends him off to deliver the disk to Susie. On the way PC is hit by a car and ends up in the house of Zac and his family and unable to complete his mission. However PC is no ordinary dog and this should hopefully be no more than a bit of a setback when he works out how to get Zac's computer to make him speak.
Having just watching one Billy Connolly film where he took money for very little effort, I decided to watch another one in Paws. The story is a mishmash children's film where the whole joke appears to be that the dog can talk. The plot is a strange affair where a sub-par Cruella de Ville chases information squirreled away on a floppy disk carried by a dog; quite what is on the disk and what the point of it all is will be of little importance to child viewers and even less to adult viewers because it often takes second billing to the fact that the dog can talk. You see, this is a film about a talking dog I know I have said that three times already but it bares repeating because that is what the film is built on. This is maybe enough to satisfy children because it does produce some laughs and slapstick comedy but it certainly will not do anything for adults or older children because it doesn't have anything other than the occasional funny line.
This puts a lot of weight on Connolly's shoulders and mostly he cannot carry it. With a voice over that sounds remote from the on screen action and a "computer software" gimmick that saves the film doing lip morphing on the dog, Connolly essentially plays his stand-up character except with all the swearing and laughs cut out. Here and there he is funny but mostly the material isn't there for him. The rest of the cast don't do much; Cavaleri is bland and uninspiring, Francois is obvious and the majority of the adult cast just mug along. Gore marks herself out by showing that Glen Close was actually pretty good in the Dalmatians films or at least she cannot be easily copied.
Overall this is a so-so kids movie but barely. The laughs are thin on the ground for all age groups and the plot can safely be ignored by audiences just as it was by the writers, which leaves the studio-bound Connolly carrying the bag, which he can't do with the material given to work with. Nothing special then and certainly not a film worth seeking out for your kids when there are much better things out there.
