Men get touchy about their hair loss—and that’s just from their heads. Imagine being a bald cat. Talk about reasons for irritability and wearing sweaters.
Formerly fluffy Kitty Galore is now a wizened pink shadow of her old self. Consequently, she’s livid—and not just because her skin turns funny colors when the temperature changes. She wants to punish the dim dogs that chased her into a vat of hair removal cream.
But just making those few dogs pay isn’t enough for her. So she plots to torment dogs all over the world. Using a “call of the wild” satellite transmission—a sound that will drive canines crazier than cats in a room full of poodles—she can turn dogs against their owners and cause mass mayhem. Then cats will rule the planet, as it should be.
That’s Kitty’s opinion at least.
Meanwhile, Diggs, a former police German shepherd is on his last paw in a kennel for disobeying human orders—again. His human partner, Shane, wants to adopt him, but since the pooch is state property, that’s impossible. So in the cage Diggs sits. Lucky for him a canine intelligence agency thinks he’s got what it takes to fight Kitty Galore’s radical felineism. He’s recruited by a veteran spy dog named Butch, and the two prepare to take a bite out of the feline underworld. There’s just one catch: Not all cats agree with Kitty. Some of them are actually fighting to save man- and doggiekind! So Diggs, a lifelong cat hater, must overcome his prejudices while working with secret agent Catherine—a cat!—to stop Kitty and her evil plan.
Joined by Butch, a spacey pigeon named Seamus, and undercover spy cats and dogs everywhere, Diggs and Catherine must learn how to work together to save the planet—and dogs’ sanity.
Both cats and dogs are eager to save mankind and one another. Their sacrifices might be a funny mixture of live action, pet puppetry and computer animation, but they display courage, selflessness and camaraderie nonetheless.
Diggs has been sent to multiple kennels because of his, um, maverick temperament. He says he disobeys orders because he only trusts himself. (If he trusted anybody else, he’d be giving them the chance to let him down.) Gradually, with Butch’s and Catherine’s help, he learns this is a lie. And once he’s recruited by the super-secret doggie intelligence agency, he also learns the value of teamwork—even with cats. He and other species come to trust and sacrifice for one another. When Diggs returns to his human family, he’s well-behaved, humbled and happy. They say he’s a new dog.
Catherine removes a splinter from Diggs’ paw and offers him a place to stay when he has none. Shane tries hard to rescue Diggs.
“Doberman or not,” spy dogs are asked not to “pinch her” during a workplace sexual harassment announcement. Afghan hounds stand in for sexy blond women as Diggs greets the “ladies” and suggestively says, “Hate to see you go, love to watch you leave.” Women’s underwear falls on Diggs in a laundry room.
Diggs bites a bad guy’s backside—in close-up slo-mo for effect—shortly before he accidentally causes a building rigged with bombs to explode. He’s thrown across the parking lot as a result.
Dogs and cats use jet packs to fly, and they narrowly miss hitting multiple objects as they soar toward bad guys and eventually crash through a billboard. Several explosives generate fiery balls of debris. Animals fall from considerable heights, and Seamus’ wing is broken (in fairly graphic fashion). One animal says it’ll rip into another like a “vat of sausages.” A human falls face-first to the ground and later dangles from an amusement park ride. A robot cat attacks Diggs and Catherine, then gets short-circuited. A carnival merry-go-round explodes. After an interspecies scuffle, Kitty chains Diggs and Catherine together, suspending them over a deep tank of water.
In a Hannibal Lector parody, a cat wears a mouth cage. Kitty’s owner, a bumbling magician, stabs a stuffed animal repeatedly when practicing a magic trick. Kitty later stabs a picture of her owner in effigy. Cats and dogs slap, punch, kick and throw one another during scuffles with baddies. Diggs dangles from a ship’s railing—over the propeller. And a cat is knocked overboard. A dog accidentally hits a human in the head with a stick, knocking him out. The robot cat puts a terrified mouse in its metal jaws.
Kitty has a pet mouse she loves almost to death—swinging him by the tail, pounding his head, dropping him and roughing him up like a stress toy.
Several dogs use the sound-alike expression “oh my dog.” Somebody says “jeez.” There are multiple unfinished exclamations of “what the …?” Several euphemistic terms for feces are used, sometimes coupled with “holy.” The code PU55 is written on a vehicle in such a way that it looks like “puss”—holding an intended double entendre. Name-calling includes “drool-bag,” “doofus,” “nutcase” and “wacko.” “Bagpipes” serves as slang for sexual anatomy.
Multiple cats are shown “hopped up on catnip.” Sixties’ music plays and stoner references abound during the scene. The “dogs playing poker” paintings are acted out, with pooches drinking, smoking and gambling.
There’s quite a bit of hydrant humor. For example, an expanding, exploding litter box almost takes over a home—and afterward the elderly owner says, “Someone made a stinky.” Dogs “act normally” by “butt-sniffing” to cover up when they’re caught talking in front of humans. Diggs almost vomits after a rough roller coaster-like ride. Intestinal worms and being dewormed are mentioned several times.
Diggs and Catherine break into a house. Several times Diggs disobeys human, canine and feline orders, going his own way instead and causing additional problems as a result. An animal is told to “go play in traffic.” Several animals lie. Diggs says Catherine drives “like a girl.”
Before attending an advance screening of this film, I told an older friend that I was going to review Kitty Galore. He asked, in all seriousness and with some degree of alarm, “Is it X-rated?”
The movie’s title, as well as its “characterization,” including a cat voiced by Roger Moore himself, is an obvious and silly homage to 007 movies in general and to Goldfinger in particular. So, no, emphatically, it’s not pornographic. But the creators of Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore certainly are attempting to capitalize on a wink-wink, it’s-a-little-bit-naughty vibe as they target both children and their parents.
The puppetry/CGI work here is impressive enough that it makes believing our four-legged friends can actually speak fairly easy for an hour or two. And the movie’s lessons in courage, partnership and obeying the rules might actually make Kitty Galore a vehicle to begin chatting about such things with younger children.
But every time you start to warm up to the tale, these fuzzy creatures say or do something a bit off color. So if this Cats & Dogs sequel begs its way into your family’s entertainment schedule, you should plan to field repeated requests for a cuddly new pet—along with questions about kitty drugs, doggie do, doggie pick-up lines and Sir Licksalot, too.
