Clifford the Big Red Dog (2021) - Review

It’s easy to be cynical about family films. There are obviously standouts, but not every movie can be “Paddington” and more often than not, studios are happy to cram beloved characters into formulaic plots just to sell toys and DVDs for car trips. And Paramount decided that, to bring “Clifford the Big Red Dog” to life in live action, they would go with Walt Becker, the director of “Van Wilder” and “Wild Hogs.” The results speak for themselves.

The film follows Emily-Elizabeth Howard, played by Darby Camp (“Big Little Lies,” “The Christmas Chronicles”), as she finds a tiny red puppy she names Clifford who, overnight, grows to be a gigantic dog, resulting in Emily and her uncle Casey, played by Jack Whitehall (“Jungle Cruise,” “Bad Education”), having to hide Clifford from a genetics company rune by Zack Tieran, played by Tony Hale (“Veep,” “Arrested Development”), who wants to take Clifford to find out what makes him so large.

This is, if it wasn’t already obvious, an incredibly generic and lifeless plot to shove a character like Clifford into. The fact that the books, PBS animated show, and animated film never even came close to a plot like this despite existing for years says a lot about the pure laziness on display throughout the entire film.

Despite Camp’s best efforts, Emily is just a bland and uninteresting protagonist, burdened by being “different” despite never showing us what it is that makes her different. She’s smart, sure, but she also goes to a fancy private New York school, implying that everyone else around her who makes fun of her for being “different” is also smart. Yet, the film and her character hinges on the idea that she’s lambasted for this the entire time she’s at school.

Whitehall is doing some absolutely pathetic work as Casey, but it's not entirely his fault. His woefully miscast, a handsome, slim, British lad being cast to play a lazy New Yorker uncle who eats candy for breakfast and doesn’t care about school. Clearly Jack Black was unavailable. Yet, despite this, Whitehall isn’t helping by clearly phoning the entire job in, regurgitating the rote plot when needed and otherwise hamming it up for the camera.

Hale also isn’t doing good work by any means, but his is at least kind of excusable given that everything based around the evil tech organization known as Lyfegro is terrible. It's just a boring antagonistic force that doesn’t even really make all that much sense in the grand scheme of the film.

That’s the biggest through-line with everything in this film: it's all just so boring. It’s hard to believe any kid would be entertained by this film. It's too slow to keep anyone’s attention under the age of 12 and it's too boring and simple to keep anyone’s attention over the age of 12. It alternates between extremely cloying jokes and sequences of forced, manipulative emotions.

At its core, the reason behind all of these issues is clear. This is a film that doesn’t respect its target demographic. This is the kind of film that gets made with the attitude of “it’s for kids, we don’t have to try” and gives a bad look to an industry still churning out gems like “Paddington” and “The Mitchells vs. The Machines.” It's lazy and just feels bad to see a family film in this day and age care so little about being anything more than being a future “3pm Movie of the Day” on Nickelodeon.

If you want a perfect example of how lazy this film is, in the beginning before Clifford has grown, the CGI model used for his tiny size is the same exact model as his large one. Nothing was adjusted for size or stature or anything, simply sized up in the post-production process because why bother? Even the CGI for Clifford in general is poor. It looks hazy and unfinished, as if he’s floating above all the other characters and sets instead of being a real part of the environment. A chase sequence later in the film features a CGI Emily-Elizabeth riding Clifford with, spoiler alert, some of the absolute worst CGI used for her in any big studio movie in recent memory.

There’s really nothing good to say about this 2021 live-action film of  “Clifford the Big Red Dog.’ The acting is hammy and poor, the CGI is bad, and it has so little respect for its target audience. It’s a film that clearly isn’t even trying to provide anyone with a decent experience, and yet it's so boring that it's hard to even get worked up enough to write a scathing review for it. It’s just lazy, not worth the time to think about, not bad enough to be funny and not good enough to be enjoyable. 1.5/5