Totally Biased Fan Review:

The premise of a crime fighting dog had me suspecting this movie would be seriously lame. Suprisingly, its not. Cop Dog has a bizarre morbid tone that earned it a PG rating and a lot of trippy moments that are unintentionally hilarious.

SPOILERS BELOW (well... if you watched the trailer there's nothing left to spoil)

Robbie North's (Billy Unger) life sucks. His father, a police officer with the K-9 unit, fell down a well and croaked but nobody seems to care but him. His mom is sick of taking him to visit his dad's grave every day and wants to ship him off to an ominous school called Walden Pines. For a brief moment, things start to look up for Robbie when he adopts his Dad's old partner... a dog named Marlowe (Kuma the dog). Robbie is hopeful that Marlowe's crime fighting skills will help him resolve some lingering questions about Dad's demise.

Meanwhile, a string of robberies are being committed in Robbie's neighborhood. Turns out a couple of crooks called Clint (Corin Nemec) and Barry (Alexander Chaplin) are using a hatch behind Robbie's house to hide their stolen goods. This hatch is located suspiciously close to the area where the Dad bought his last ticket.

Robbie, Marlowe and Deb (Cassi Thomson) stumble across these bumbling crooks and start to put two and two together. This is where the movie gets some momentum.

Corin and the guy who looks kinda like Casey Affleck spend a lot of time fleeing in terror from the singularly un-ferocious looking dog (see below) before their dramatic confrontation with Robbie and Marlowe and predictable capture.

That chase scene ranked up with the Robomom asking her dead husband's shirt for parenting advice.

The Good:

• That Billy Unger kid has potential. He won a Young Artist Award (Best Performance in a DVD Film) for this role and his imdb page is starting to rival the length of Donald Sutherland's. I'm suprised that his parents haven't sold him into slavery at the Disney Channel yet.
• The gum stakeout at the Quik Stop was pretty clever. Would have been even better if Dante or Randall were working that day and Jay and Silent Bob were loitering outside.
• The Hatch. I know its a stupid plot device but during the boring parts of the movie I had fun speculating about what could be in the hatch... the diamonds from Resevoir Dogs? The alien corpses from Repo Man? Dharma Station?
• Killing off the title character (the dog) right off the bat then pulling the whole Ghost Whisperer number got my attention.
• Walden Pines. Mom's convinced that Robbie is a mental case and is eager to ship his ass off to some nuthouse/special school for kids who see dead dogs. This lends a sense of urgency to the proceedings. (I think she also wanted him out of her hair so she could get busy with that detective who was always hanging around).

The Bad:

• Bad melodramatic elevator music that NEVER STOPS. Once in a while it pauses for 5 seconds then starts up again. Drove me batshit.
• Corin is sporting that weird hat head hairdo in this movie. Somebody at Super Cuts owes him a refund.
• What the hell kind of low-rent neighborhood are these thieves operating in? They're planning to travel to far-flung destinations on their ill-gotten gains but with that mess of chintzy fake jewelry they would be lucky to get the price of a six pack from Cash4Gold.
• Walden Pines. Everybody knows you hire boot camp thugs to forcibly escort your kid to the nuthouse/special school. It has to be done in the middle of the night when they are in stupor. If you leave brochures laying around you lose the element of suprise.

The Ugly:

• The lady that played the mom couldn't act her way out of a kindergarten play. Robotic performance, always smiling at inappropriate moments... just creeped me out in general. She would have been good in The Stepford Wives though.

Recommendation:

Little kids and people who are slow will enjoy this movie. Sparky Gottfried would have LOVED this film. You can watch it on demand at Amazon.com for $3.99.