I saw this on Netflix. I watched almost the whole thing because I wanted to watch a bad kid movie. I knew it wasn't going to be good and I expected not much quality, but I found myself laughing at the directing rather than the story.
This movie is so poorly directed it's a disgrace to people who want to work in the film industry. Multiple times the camera can be seen in reflections, once in a mirror, where the camera is on a tripod and they move the tripod for no reason into the mirror a bit, and then back out. A few times I could see members of the crew in reflections.
Most scenes in the movie early on are conversations between the daughter and her mother. They speak about stuff that is not entertaining or engaging whatsoever, which makes me feel bad for children who are more than likely to become bored with the conversations.
But the worst part is that the dog, who is hardly a character, is always watching the conversation, but the location of the dog relative to the other characters is NEVER established.
Often times the dog is in another room looking around the room and at the crew and it's supposed to be in the same room. Often times the dog is ACTUALLY in another room. Because they filmed in the room before and you can see a piece of furniture from the living room from an earlier scene in the background when the dog is supposed to be in the kitchen. The only purpose of putting the dog in the scene is so that they can have something to cut between for editing efficiency. Every reaction shot of the dog is the same, the dog never responds to anything, it just sits there, sometimes looking at the cameraman. We never know where the dog is in relation to the people. The camera suggests that it's in one spot and sometimes we never find out if it was there or not. Sometimes a character walks out and the dog looks at them from left to right, but that completely disjoints where the dog would have been because the dog should be looking right to left.
In one scene the characters drive to a place and the whole scene is filmed in wide establishing shots of the car driving, the main two characters talking about "who cares" as usual. And then we get a shot of the dog inside the car from a stupid angle where the camera was just shoved in the back seat. And if you look out the window, there's a tree. The car isn't even moving. They use this shot 2 more times. Same tree. The continuity sucks.
There is one montage scene where the mother and daughter dye eggs that lasts for 5 minutes. It feels like 10. The camera dollys back and forth, poorly, over and over. It's slow, it's not fun at all, there are no closeups of the eggs, the actors are just talking about nothing barley having fun, and each shot establishes nothing that the previous shot didn't. They are dying eggs. We get it.
Another problem is the eye lines. In one scene the mother is talking to her daughter. The mother looks to the wrong spot in the room. Her daughter is not over there, she's somewhere else. I mean this is like really simple stuff that could be fixed and should have easily been taken into consideration while filming.
The story is generic as expected, which is the least of my problems. It's just so un-involving. It's really hard to care about what the mother and daughter are talking about at any time.
If you expect something cute, it doesn't even deliver. The dog is pretty cute but it doesn't do anything cute and it's hardly a character. It mostly sits on the floor between conversations.
The directing sucks. The director sucks. The editing sucks. The continuity is horrendous. The acting is mediocre but it blends in with the poor quality of the movie so it doesn't stand out as bad. I also blame the director for the acting. I know it's supposed to be a goofy kids movie, but kids would be BORED with this. It's not a fun movie by any means and the dog is barley in it and it's hardly about the dog.
