Review: `Old Dogs' Proves a Mangy Mongrel

In case anyone in the audience isn't sure when to cackle, coo, snicker or sigh, the makers of "Old Dogs" have provided a handy on-screen prompt.

In this film publicity image released by Disney, John Travolta, left, and Robin Williams are shown in a scene from the film, "Old Dogs." (AP Photo/Disney, Ron Phillips)

(AP)

It's an old dog, shown in closeup, reacting with little grunts of canine confusion or curiosity over the antics of Robin Williams and John Travolta in this dead stray of a family comedy.

Director Walt Becker cuts away to the pooch, the aging pet of Travolta's character, again and again. So often, in fact, that maybe Sebastian, the 9-year-old dog playing the creaky old pet, should have shared top billing with Travolta and Williams in this rubbish about middle-aged buddies caring for young twins one of them never knew he fathered.

At some point, you half expect to hear the dog's thoughts, like the yammering pets in "Look Who's Talking Now," the last in Travolta's talking-baby series (a movie franchise that seems like Preston Sturges compared to this).

Whatever the old dog might want to say, it's bound to have been more interesting than anything uttered by the two-legged creatures in "Old Dogs."

Becker, who scored a hit working with Travolta on 2007's dumb but inoffensive "Wild Hogs," takes things down a notch or two for "Old Dogs."

Travolta plays swinging bachelor Charlie to Williams' mopey Dan, pals since childhood who run a successful sports-marketing agency.

The movie opens with a flurry of ham-fisted flashbacks as Charlie inexplicably starts a crucial business meeting by chronicling Dan's whirlwind marriage to Vicki (Kelly Preston, Travolta's real-life wife) seven years earlier.

Dan and Vicki split immediately, but the brief marriage resulted in twins (Conner Rayburn and Ella Bleu Travolta, Preston and Travolta's daughter). With Charlie and Dan caught up in negotiations for the biggest deal of their careers, Vicki arrives needing to stash the kids with their dad for two weeks while she's off doing jail time for a political protest.