We summer camp counselors at the local park district have a need for only one enemy: rain. Those who have studied chemistry will recall that a container with a large volume will enclose gas under a relatively low pressure, and vice versa. Consider five-year-olds to be like these gaseous molecules; anything that forces them from an open — albeit drenched — field and into a dry, cramped room may bring order, but certainly not peace.
When push comes to shove, there is a television readily available indoors; in other words, we cheat. Few things settle these campers down like a film, and I’ve seen them bounce off walls when there are none to bounce off of. As the lights dim, their tiny eyes become fixated on the glowing, mounted screen before them, and the plastic trucks and game pieces that they had hoped only seconds before would serve as suitable throwing objects silently roll from their fingers. Say what you will about cartoons rotting kids’ brains — at least it’ll transform them into pacifists.
Anyway... so no, I didn’t see The Secret Life of Pets by my own volition. I most likely wouldn’t have seen it otherwise, and seeing it now, I realize that I was probably justified in my former inclination. The little ones liked it sure enough. As I gazed over at them on the carpet from my fold-up chair, I remembered that I was once like them, permeable to exhaustive entertainment like this, not all of it having been mindless. I wouldn’t say I envied them at this moment, however. Long ago, I feared that I would grow up to watch these kinds of movies in the stale, unconcerned way I watched “The Secret Life”; now, I figure that I felt as much because I simply grew up with better movies — keep in mind that there was a time when Pixar relied on its ethereal imagination rather than sequels (if you’re keeping track at home, Toy Story 2 is the only real sound one to date).
The Secret Life of Pets is not a sequel, but I nevertheless feel like I’ve already seen all it has to offer. It certainly doesn’t have the stamp of originality on its side. There’s no surprises. Not even one. I am sorry to say that it is fundamentally a carbon copy of Toy Story, one that replaces the character of Woody with Max (voiced by Louis C.K.), a preppy terrier who’s cooped up during the day in an upscale New York apartment by himself while his owner Katie (Ellie Kemper) is out doing… something. I would assume that she must work somehow to afford the modern-looking (expensive) high-rise abode that she owns now, but her absence exists mainly to allow for the film’s half-baked premise: simultaneously — and miraculously, since all of their owners manifestly leave their places according to a synchronized schedule — the various pets of the building crawl, slither, or glide from window to window for chatting purposes. They communicate with each other in a language personified by what the audience is made to perceive as English. What else?
Contrary to Toy Story (which The Secret Life of Pets is not often), there is no “secret” in the fact that these animals have voices, since humans are apparently the only species who don’t recognize it. Max’s speech, which is clear as day to us, only sounds like barking to Katie. In fact, I was curious to find no such “secret” promised to me in the title. The movie only re-packages the socially accepted gimmicks and stereotypes for dogs, cats, and other respective animals in a generalized context that is only partially separated from their owners’. For example: cats are already largely considered to be self-interested. Was it so much of an intellectual leap for the filmmakers to enlist this movie’s feline as the glutty sleuth who predictably falls prey to the lure of a toy mouse? It’s a joke we’ve all seen before, and the film knows it — does it really think we want to see it again?
With its overwhelmingly physical humor, The Secret Life of Pets is grossly irritating at its worst and only moderately entertaining at its best. The latter trait, if I haven’t already made clear enough, doesn’t pop up enough. As in any show for children, its story feeds off its characters, but here, their development is almost consistently missing an extra step, particularly the one that makes us like them. Consider this: personality is separate from the ability to speak. We gather that these critters — essentially used to fill up the screen — look up to Max, but for what reason? Woody falsely claimed that he was skeptical of Buzz for the safety of his society of toys, but even when his motives were pointed inward, they were understandable and rooted in socialization. The Buzz figure in this one is Duke (Eric Stonestreet), a dog that Katie adopts early on and is intended to be a pleasant surprise to Max, who is smaller and less fluffy by a calculated amount. Duke also seems nicer, at least until Max threatens to kick Duke out of Katie’s apartment. There is no evidence to suggest that Max defends his territory to protect his community because we haven’t seen him do anything of the sort. He is selfish. Does he even deserve Duke's friendship? Here is once again a narrative that is at odds with its characters, who are inevitably pushed through a series of physical — not emotional — hurdles to force them back together when they had no reason for separating in the first place… other than the plot’s requirement that they do.
If you watch CinemaSins on YouTube — a channel that sifts through films to “expose” the plot holes and cliches that supposedly riddle them — then you will pick out that I’ve based a lot of my criticism in this review on its entry for The Secret Life of Pets. I don’t always agree with their means; the number of “sins” that the bloggers find are rarely indicative of the quality of a given target. I will say, however, that for once, the "Secret Life” episode perfectly and holistically summarizes my thoughts on the picture — it’s the throwaway flaws themselves that cause its failure. It has much less going on than it would like to believe; as busy as it looks, the drive behind the action just stagnates. Kevin Hart voices a comically deranged, antagonistic bunny who lurks in the sewers with his gang of thugs, and he is — like in many of his previous works — blatantly overused. He is positioned such that Max and Duke bump into and inadvertently anger him when they inevitably stray too far from home, but after chasing the two around the city for a couple of hours, who knows? Maybe he’ll have an inexplicable change of heart. Do you see how I only needed two sentences there? The film could have gotten that across in a lot under an hour and a half, and Hart could have vocalized it many decibels softer.
Kids movies get worse than this, but Finding Nemo and Wall-E have raised the bar high enough for us to expect more. That was a while ago. The Secret Life of Pets is better than getting stuck in a rainstorm. I wouldn’t choose it over a sunny day. Or a cloudy one, for that matter.
