Cats & Dogs 3: Paws Unite (2020)

(On Cable TV, June 2021) In tackling a film like Cats & Dogs 3: Paws Unite, it’s useful to recalibrate. It’s a talking-animals film for kids, obviously, but it’s also a franchise entry. One imagines Warner Brothers Home Entertainment executives, looking for a decently lucrative prospect, looking over the list of homegrown intellectual properties and noticing that Cats & Dogs 2: The Revenge of Kitty Galore was nearly ten years old, didn’t require heavy narrative continuity, and (to belabour the point) was an easy sell as a kids’ movie with talking animals. The rest is mechanical in today’s home entertainment market: low budget, formula-based script and actors less important than fast special effects. All made to satisfy a streaming maw clamouring for new content to keep the kids occupied. Even with those expectations, however, Paws Unite isn’t much to bark about. It does have the decency to acknowledge in its promising animated opening sequence the gap between sequels in pointing out how the past decade has been incredibly quiet for the animal agents of their spy organization. The rest of director Sean McNamara’s film, however, isn’t as clever: Soon enough, the true production values take over, bringing along its limp narrative, half-amusing lines, perfunctory special effects and merely adequate actors. It’s not intolerable — there’s enough juice even on the film’s carefully engineered mediocrity that the film gets a few grins along the way. But Cats & Dogs 3: Paws Unite is really the most perfunctory film imaginable — not bad enough to dismiss, not good enough to praise.