In Muzzle: City of Wolves, a K-9 trainer flees a cartel that wants vengeance against him and his dogs. Foul language, brutal murders, animal violence, forced suicides and more plague this action-packed plot—with almost nothing positive to take away.
A wolf without a pack won’t survive long.
Oh sure, we hear about “lone wolves” all the time in American fiction. It’s a pretty common colloquialism. But in the wild? Being a lone wolf is meant to be a temporary phase, a time to seek out a mate and start a new pack. But that wolf is vulnerable. It’s difficult to hunt alone. Rival packs might attack him. And humans are more likely to strike him down.
Jake Rosser knows this from firsthand experience. The K-9 trainer became vulnerable himself after his K-9 partner, Ace, was killed in a shootout with local drug dealers.
Jake had no pack to help him hunt down Ace’s killers (as chronicled in the original movie Muzzle). The drug cartel wanted him dead. But luckily, Jake quickly found a new partner in Socks, and they managed to track down Ace’s killers, unveiling a drug cartel that was using its own canine units for nefarious deeds.
After that, Jake and Socks retired from the police force. Jake got married and had a baby. Socks had her own litter of puppies. And Jake has been training her pups to become the next generation of K-9 units, teaching them everything they need to know so they can disperse and find their own partners.
Unfortunately, the cartel isn’t so quick to forget. They want revenge. And they’re coming for Jake and his new pack.
Jake’s marriage is a bit on the rocks. He suffers from PTSD, and although he promised his wife, Mia, that he would get help, he hasn’t. Instead, he chooses to bury himself in his work: training his dogs. Mia tries to be as understanding as she can, but in her efforts to support Jake, she has inadvertently enabled him. However, the couple refuses to give up on each other, and they agree to go to marriage counseling to build a better future together.
Though Jake is training his dogs for the harsh realities of police work, he shares a special bond with them. Each dog is well cared for and loved. Socks would do anything to protect Jake and Mia from harm. And one of her pups, Argos, takes up that mantle as well. Jake similarly would do almost anything to protect his dogs and his family.
A few characters act sacrificially to save the ones they love. A woman stays by her husband’s side as he dies. A whistleblower and reporter reveal corruption at a pharmaceutical company.
The leader of the drug cartel tells his victims that if God exists, then He either doesn’t care or doesn’t listen. He declares that he is their god now—an assertion he seems to be quite serious about—and orders them to pray to him.
This same man has his goons pose the dead bodies of his victims in a street square, set up like a shrine to Santa Muerta (“Saint Death”). Someone notes that Santa Muerta is not sanctioned by the Church. We see an altar to Santa Muerta at the cartel’s base: a skeleton dressed as the Grim Reaper, surrounded by human skulls and candles.
Jake prays to God in one scene, offering to do anything to spare the lives of his family. The cartel leader, using surveillance technology, hears this prayer and uses it to manipulate Jake later on. But when the guy blasphemes God’s name by declaring himself to be God, Jake rebuts him.
As Jake spreads the ashes of one of his dogs, he says, “I’ll see you soon,” indicating that he believes he’ll see the dog in heaven.
We see a woman running in a sports bra and leggings.
For anyone who might be sensitive to cruelty perpetrated against or by animals, let me just warn you now that there’s a lot of both in this film.
The cartel uses dogs to kill several victims—including children. For the most part, we don’t see these deaths occur onscreen (though do dogs maul a man in a heavily blurred background shot), but the scenes leading up to them (and the sounds we hear) make it clear what’s occurring just off camera.
Unfortunately, we do see other deaths occur as result of animal violence. Jake orders his dogs to attack in several scenes. The dogs typically go for their attackers’ throats and faces, but they’ll bite down on arms and legs, too. Argos, the main dog in this film, goes for a man’s face and spits out something when he’s done. The man he attacked presumably bleeds out from his jaw and throat, both of which are horribly mangled.
A man with a knife attacks Jake and Mia, hitting Mia on the head and knocking her to the floor. Jake orders one of his dogs to defend them, so the guy stabs the animal and throws it against a wall. Shortly after, the rest of the dogs show up and jump on the man, taking him down. Jake watches as the dogs tear the man apart just off screen, purposely refusing to call them off.
Several bombs explode, killing humans and dogs alike. A police officer threatens to shoot one of Jake’s dogs when he’s unable to get the animal under control. Jake sometimes commands his dogs into dangerous situations. (And one dog, after a traumatic experience, hesitates a few times out of fear.)
A vet is ordered by a cartel goon to euthanize a dog. He’s handed a syringe and cattle prod to subdue the animal. The vet is hesitant but complies. The dog escapes before the drug can be administered though, and the vet accidentally shocks the goon in the groin with the cattle prod.
City of Wolves engages with forced suicide, too. Jake is handed a gun with one bullet and ordered to play Russian roulette. He’s told that for every empty “click,” the cartel will free someone he loves. Without hesitation, he pulls the trigger twice in succession, releasing his son and wife in the process. He pulls it again to free a friend. And he nearly pulls it a fourth time to save his dog. In another scene, someone tries to force him to drink a lethal concoction, under threat of watching his family burn alive online.
We watch as a man is forced to douse himself in gasoline before setting himself on fire—all to save his family. He dies in a painful inferno. Elsewhere, we’re told a man “died by suicide” (though the movie makes it clear the man was actually murdered), and we see his (clothed) body in a tub full of bloody water.
Jake shoots a man point-blank in the head. He exchanges gunfire with people who work for the cartel throughout the film. A man with a machine gun fires at Jake but misses, hitting an innocent bystander instead. Other innocent people are shot, sometimes at point-blank range. One woman is suffocated with a pillow after being tricked into drinking poison. A woman is shot in the leg and nearly bleeds out. An ambulance is T-boned by cartel goons. They open fire on the overturned emergency vehicle, killing both EMTs and the wounded person they were transporting.
Flashbacks show Jake killing people in his first fight against the cartel. We see the dead bodies of cartel victims posed grotesquely in a street square and in front of someone’s house (the latter of which involves a decapitated head). We hear that police found a man’s body but not his head. Elsewhere, a police officer’s head is put on a sort of pike in front of someone’s house.
A police officer uses a baton to knock Jake unconscious. Several fistfights occur. Jake bloodies a man’s face during a fight and uses the butt of a gun to knock the guy unconscious. He threatens an innocent woman, too, trying to stop her from ratting him out. We see another woman tied up in the trunk of a car, tape over her mouth.
Jake holds up a gas station. The sole employee fears that Jake is going to sexually assault him, so he tells police that Jake is trying to rape him. (Jake is not, but the guy is scared and says he’s struggling with mental health problems.)
As evidenced by their wounds, most of the cartel victims were tied up and beaten. Several people are kept in cages. The cartel’s leader threatens the families of his victims in order to force them to do his bidding.
In a flashback, Jake’s infant son accidentally falls off a ledge; Jake catches the baby by the leg, but Jake and Mia still take the baby to the hospital for treatment.
About 14 uses of the f-word and five of the s-word. We also hear “a–hole,” “b–ch” and “h—.” God’s name is misused six times.
We learn that Jake struggled with alcohol abuse for a while because of PTSD. He carries a 1-year sobriety chip, now. However, in a scene where he’s forced to play Russian roulette to save his family, he drinks a shot of tequila before pulling the trigger.
One guys smokes cigarettes throughout the film. We don’t see any drugs onscreen, but we hear a lot about them given the film’s antagonists. Someone makes an off-hand remark about “dirty needles.”
The cartel commits a number of crimes besides killing people and dealing drugs, including kidnapping, illegal surveillance and hacking. We hear a pharmaceutical company is supplying the cartel with drugs.
Jake is falsely accused of being a terrorist. News stations incorrectly report that he is a white supremacist guilty of hate crimes, too, and Jake is later arrested based on those accusations. He escapes custody and commits some actual crimes (namely theft and threatening innocent people) in an attempt to catch the real bad guys.
We hear that an insurance company refuses to pay out a policy because of the lack of video surveillance. We see a great number of homeless people living in tents. One homeless man shows clear signs of mental unwellness. Some guys discuss conspiracy theories.
Animal control puts a dog into a cage using a collar attached to a pole (for their own safety). They muzzle the dog.
Mia monologues about how even if parents manage to give their child a trauma-free upbringing, the best they can hope for is to slowly watch their child’s spark “flicker out.” She seems to have a hopeless view of the world.
“Man is the cruelest animal.” So says Nietzsche. And so says the film’s opening placard.
But the thing about that statement is that man isn’t an animal. Man is … man. We’re sentient beings, fully capable of understanding right from wrong. So to compare us to animals actually feels a bit unfair to those creatures.
A dog doesn’t know that his owner deals life-harming drugs. He doesn’t know that his owner has kidnapped people, or threatened them, or murdered them. He certainly doesn’t know that his owner is pretending to be God. He just knows that the person who provides it with food, with shelter, with (perhaps) love, is ordering him to attack the guy standing in front of him.
And yet, the dog will be judged complicit when his owner is finally caught. The dog will be euthanized while the owner potentially lives out his days in prison.
But whatever you think of Nietzsche’s statement, perhaps it’s also cruel to ask audiences to suffer through this film.
Harsh language, brutal killings—several of which are committed against dogs, others carried out by dogs acting on human orders—kidnapping, substance abuse and forced suicide all plague this film.
You might be drawn in by Muzzle: City of Wolves’ cute canine cast members. But don’t be fooled: There’s nothing here to suggest that anything other than a human being, sinners that we are, could come up with a story so bereft of hope.
Emily studied film and writing when she was in college. And when she isn’t being way too competitive while playing board games, she enjoys food, sleep, and geeking out with her husband indulging in their “nerdoms,” which is the collective fan cultures of everything they love, such as Star Wars, Star Trek, Stargate and Lord of the Rings.
