They say that a dog is a man’s best friend. And friends would do anything for each other.
Lulu’s not so sure anymore. In fact, she’s pretty much done with humans. And her new, would-be human handler, Briggs, seems like more of a cat person anyway.
The two know each other pretty well already. And both would’ve counted Lulu’s original handler, Sgt. Riley Rodriguez, as one of their best friends, to be sure. Briggs and Rodriguez were Army Rangers, and Lulu served faithfully with their unit—tour after tour, fight after fight, belly rub after belly rub.
But with years of service come years of scars. All three had their share: Briggs and Lulu suffered their own forms of head trauma. And Rodriguez? Well, he eventually ran his vehicle straight into a tree.
Briggs’ concussions make him a liability these days, he’s told. He’s been sidelined for a while now. But being a Ranger is all he knows and all he loves. He’s applied to work diplomatic security, and he feels like he’s ready. His commanding officer’s not so sure. But finally, the captain relents—a little. He decides to give Briggs a chance to prove himself. But it’s a dog of a job.
Lulu’s locked in a cage at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington state, prone to attack anyone who comes close. “One minute she’s fine, the next she’s sending two guys to the ER,” one of Lulu’s temporary keepers says. Rodriguez’s funeral is being held in Arizona in five days’ time. His family wants Lulu there at the ceremony: Rodriguez and Lulu were inseparable, after all. But the beast refuses to fly. And who’s going to argue with a Belgian Malinois with Ranger training?
So to get Lulu to the funeral on time means a road trip. And Briggs, maybe, is just the Ranger to chauffer the pooch to Arizona.
“You stick your neck out for the battalion, I’ll stick my neck out for you,” the captain tells Briggs.
But spending five days with a big, crazy, potentially lethal dog won’t be easy. And even if Briggs and Lulu make it to Arizona alive, who’s to say that Lulu might not eat everybody at the funeral? No question, this is a ruff job.
Though Dog is a technically comedy, it deals with a very serious, very important issue: mental health in the military. Seeking help for mental and/or emotional problems has historically been stigmatized in the armed forces, and I’d imagine that’d be especially true in the Army’s elite Rangers regiment. It’s certainly true of Briggs.
Though Briggs’ brain has been knocked out of joint via concussion(s), he’s desperate to return to duty. So he tries to push through and minimize or hide the lingering side effects to prove he’s ready—even though he’s not. “You don’t see some little seizure stopping me, do you?” he says at one point.
Lulu, too, is suffering. Locked in a kennel before the road trip, she’s missing her work as much as Briggs misses his.
As such, Dog is really about both of these soldiers finding a way forward—and a way toward healing. That healing, naturally, requires a level of trust and support, elements that typically require more than five days to develop. But through this concentrated road trip (and the magic of moviemaking), that trust does grow. And Briggs comes to understand that finding personal meaning might be possible after his life with the Army. And wherever that life leads him, he doesn’t have to go it alone.
“We’re trained to carry the whole world on your back,” a fellow (albeit retired) soldier tells him. “But sometimes, the hardest thing is just knocking on your friend’s door.”
That’s a good word.
That retired soldier, we discover, is a man of faith—and he suggests that his faith helped save him from his own descent into darkness. He tells Briggs that it’s important to talk about his experiences: “To other guys who’d gone through it or maybe just to God.” He backtracks a bit, saying that it’s the talking that matters—not the hope of divine intervention. He says that for some, God could be anything: “Could be a rock, could be a shoe, could be his d–n barber.” But for this man, God is more than a shoe. And as Briggs leaves his house, the man says, “I’ll be praying for you guys.”
But Briggs encounters other forms of spirituality, too. He encounters two women who tell him that they’re Tantric coaches (they use sex for spiritual enlightenment) and talk about chakras (energy points in the body). All of that is related to Hinduism, Buddhism and other forms of Eastern spirituality, and Briggs exclaims “oh my Buddha!” as he (ahem) engages with the women.
Briggs and Lulu also run into a woman who claims that she’s psychic and can read animals’ minds. The woman, Tamara, tells Briggs that Lulu and he are “karmically connected,” and believes that Lulu may have been a reincarnated soul originally from ancient Egypt. Tamara also tells Briggs that Lulu really wants to sleep in a nice, soft bed for once in her life. And while Tamara’s husband tells Briggs that Tamara “bats about .350 on those” predictions, Briggs does go out of his way to give Lulu what she supposedly wants.
As a military dog trained for work in Iraq and Afghanistan, Lulu’s been trained to attack people who dress in typically Islamic garb. That training, unfortunately, comes into play in the lobby of a posh San Francisco hotel.
We see a Christian funeral. We hear some talk about Mother Earth and Valhalla (the Viking version of heaven), and a book full of tips for how to deal with Lulu is called a “bible.” Briggs calls Lulu a “demon” once. A couple of commandments are quoted.
Briggs seeks out female companionship just as the road trip gets underway. He strikes out repeatedly at a local bar, but the “tantric coaches” mentioned above seem to take an interest in him. They take him back to their place, where they embrace him from both sides and request permission to take off his shirt. (He gives it.) But before Briggs can take off either of the other two women’s shirts, the encounter is cut short.
Briggs flirts with a hotel employee, too. We see him shirtless and in his underwear on occasion, and he takes a bath with Lulu. (“You’re definitely not the girl I thought I’d be in the tub with, but hey,” he quips as he scrubs her fur.) We learn that Briggs has a daughter, whom he tries to visit. There’s a reference to vaginas.
Lulu has “every trigger in the book,” and we see plenty of those triggers play out. While muzzled, she lunges and attacks people (including Briggs), and she grabs hold of a couple of mal-doers when she’s unmuzzled, too. Briggs learns that she really missed putting all her military training to work: For Lulu, performing the tasks that she was taught to perform relieves stress, and Briggs and Lulu eventually participate in some violent training exercises (where Briggs dons pads and Lulu essentially attacks him). The two have a more serious showdown, too, but one that ends peacefully.
Lulu destroys plenty of personal property as well, including the front seat of Briggs’ Ford Bronco. And she likely eats a chicken or two. In a notebook chronicling Lulu and Rodriguez’s military service (which Rodriguez filled with pictures and poems as part of his therapy), we see photos of Lulu in action and drawings of her in a sometimes-bloodied frenzy. She’s now considered a “liability,” and once she attends Rodriguez’s funeral, Briggs has been asked to take her to another base where they’ll euthanize her.
Being a Ranger, Briggs is pretty dangerous in his own right. And when the two are captured, the soldier escapes and nearly kills their captors with an ax. (“I’m so happy we didn’t have to kill those nice people,” he tells Lulu.)
We’re told that Rangers “find a way to die,” and it’s suggested that Rodriguez found his way by driving into a tree. Briggs tells Lulu a death fantasy of his own: “Fly a prop plane [toward] the sun ’til the engine froze.” The two tantric coaches examine the scars on his torso, asking where they came from. (One, Briggs tells them, was caused by a bullet from an AK-47.) He has a few seizures that cause him to collapse.
About 25 s-words and a kennel’s-worth of other profanities, including “a–,” “b–ch,” “d–n,” “h—” and “p-ss.” God’s name is misused twice, and Jesus’ name is abused three times. Briggs thanks Army MPs for their service before flipping them the bird.
Briggs and Lulu encounter a pair of illegal marijuana farmers. One shoots Briggs with a tranquilizer dart (which knocks him out cold for a bit). Later, Briggs and his assailant suck on a couple of marijuana-laced lollipops.
The movie suggests that pain management is a significant issue for Rangers, and one of them says that he used to take three Percocets just to get out of bed in the morning. “That’s just the breakfast of champions,” Briggs says, adding, “and [Rodriguez] was a champion.”
Briggs takes medication, too—and he speculates that someone took his “migrane meds” and snorted them. He gives Lulu allergy medication to put the dog to sleep. He and a number of other Rangers commemorate Rodriguez by getting drunk at a bar. (One man needs to be literally dragged out of the establishment.) He drinks with a number of women at a singles bar, and he and another soldier quaff beers at the soldier’s house. He sits on top his SUV and drinks Jim Beam, too.
Briggs is currently working at a sandwich shop, and when he puts the wrong ingredient on a sandwich, the customer derisively asks, “Are you high?” A liquor bottle often sits right by Briggs’ bedside.
Briggs pretends to be blind to get a complimentary hotel room for himself and Lulu. (When the plot goes awry, he pretends that his sudden sight is a miracle.) He talks about how dogs usually greet each other … by sniffing each other’s anuses.
When Riley Rodriguez was alive and serving as Lulu’s handler, he compiled a binder filled with thoughts and memories of he and Lulu’s time together: drawings. Photos. Even poems to his closest partner in the Army. His best friend.
Briggs at first scoffs at the binder’s contents, chalking it up to (what he considers) worthless counseling exercises and “art therapy bulls—.” But late one stormy night, he reads it in earnest. And he sees where Rodriguez wrote to Lulu after she’d suffered her most serious injury and they took her away from him.
“That’s when it hit me,” Rodriguez wrote. “I was never your handler. You were actually mine.”
For lots of people, that’s true. Dogs can be more than servants, more than pets. They can be confidantes, friends, critical pillars of support. Studies show that owning pets can reduce stress, anxiety and depression. And I’d imagine that in a military environment, where a soldier’s and dog’s life are inextricably linked, that connection can be exponentially greater. It says something about that depth of attachment that Channing Tatum, who directs and stars in Dog, had a dog of his own named Lulu.
Dog, in its own humorous way, gets that connection. It’s a serious movie that makes you laugh. It suggests that we don’t just teach dogs something: They can teach us some important lessons, too.
If only the movie learned a little more from Lulu.
Lulu doesn’t swear. The characters in this movie curse a lot. Lulu doesn’t drink alcohol or knowingly take drugs. Briggs and his cohorts do some of both. Lulu’s eventual love for her humans is pure and, naturally, platonic. And when it comes to sex, Briggs feels more animalistic than his noble canine companion.
As such, the movie feels a little like Briggs’ and Lulu’s road trip itself: It ultimately reaches a positive place. But the road to that place is filled with plenty of potholes.
Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.
