K-9 (1989)

(In French, On TV, December 2019) Let’s appreciate honesty in filmmaking: K-9 is not a good movie, but it doesn’t waste any time in pretending otherwise: Within the first few minutes, we’re quickly familiarized with the film’s casual disregard for anything like subtlety or realism, what with the cowboy cop protagonist racking up what should result in disciplinary actions and lawsuits. The premise consists in pairing up a bad (oops; “lovably rogue”) policeman with a dog in order to … something to do with international drug trafficking. (The script isn’t strong in detail or plausibility.) But the dog is a dog, and the human is even more of a dog than the canine character and you can pretty much script the rest of the script yourself. Once you combine the cowboy cop theatrics with some serious sexism and the low-brow humour of John Belushi (nearly every film featuring Belushi is miscast), the result is almost repellent. K-9 is the kind of film to use when you want to show how the male gaze (and approving representation of toxic masculinity) can damage what could have been a far better film. Not only do we have a typically guy’s-guy character (openly abusing his authority, ignoring the law, roughing up suspects, threatening and sexually assaulting civilians), but the script smiles and aw-shucks whenever he enables canine fornication (with the bitch as the prize, if you’ll excuse the technical language) and reduces his girlfriend to nothing more than a kidnapping target. As the problematic issues pile up, K-9’s amiable potential dissipates and so does our patience with the result. This is no mere “fictional problem”: The Hollywood cowboy cops of the 1980s enabled the bloodthirsty ones of the 1990s, then the real trigger-happy one of the 2000s and 2010s, and K-9 is part of the problem. Even silly comedies can be awful in retrospect.