Danny the Dog

Director Louis Leterrier has taken a script written by Luc Besson and made a rather odd and funny gem of a movie starring Jet Li (Danny the Dog), Bob Hoskins (Bart), Morgan Freeman (Sam) and Kerry Condon (Victoria). The movie was written exclusively for Jet Li, which in and of itself is rather astounding.

Because of his Wushu background Jet Li is not one of those performers you think of as an actor first. He is much to good at what he does in the martial arts fighting film category, but as I think we all can agree there is more to even a good fight movie then just the fancy moves, which is why certain performers do better than others. This is the movie that shows that there is more to Jet Li than just the amazing speed and agility we’ve come to expect.

Danny the Dog has a basic premise the idea that you can take a young boy and train him basically to be your pitbull, which is what Bart (Hoskins) has done. He unlatches the collar around Danny’s neck and basically says “sick ‘em” and Danny doesn’t stop hitting until he gets the command to stop. He is treated like a dog, sleeps in a cellar and gets kicked around and treated like a dog. That is to say, he doesn’t get treated lovingly and with a firm hand, he is just expected to perform. At one point in  the story Bart even says “I own you”.

Bart is a criminal and has a criminals agenda. He basically uses Danny to scare people. When he gets ahead of himself a rival gangster takes revenge in a drive-by shooting and Danny is let loose in the world. Danny gravitates towards a warehouse full of pianos where he has previously encountered Sam (Freeman), a blind piano tuner. Sam takes him in. Slowly Danny becomes more of a man and less of a dog.

Bart has survived his ordeal and by accident one of his henchmen finds Danny and brings him back to the life he used to lead. This does not end well. There really is no way it could.

So what does this mean in terms of what the film offers?

Well, we get spectacular fights all engineered by marital arts choreographer Yuen Wo-ping who was also involved in Kill Bill, The Matrix, Crouching Tiger… just to mention a few. And the fights are really down and dirty. It’s definitely not spiritual high grade fighting, it’s more street fighting with an excess of brutal blunt force. Even the pit fights are really dirty. there are of course pit fights. Danny is just a pitbull after all.

You also get the exploration of why Danny is the way he is. He starts looking for his childhood memories, which have more or less been burnt out of him.

Danny is so childlike, so simple that it is actually quite funny to see his reactions to little things like experiencing vanilla ice cream for the first time. Brain freeze and all. And this is brought out even more as Sam and Victoria start building him up as a human being. It’s charming and sweet, and I have to say, quite surprising. The director makes a point of saying that for Jet Li language is the biggest barrier and it is easier for Li to convey things with his eyes than through speaking. They make the parallel with Buster Keaton, which is actually quite interesting in and of itself. And valid. Jet Li doesn’t have a lot of dialogue, but he is very expressive. And it works. It really does.

The special effects are very well executed and just enough that you can have that sense of what is going on and still not get sidetracked by them. The camera work in the fight sequences is of course pivotal but there are other scenes that also rely heavily on the visual to convey what’s going on in Danny’s head.

Music plays a big part in this story, since Danny ha a affinity for the piano, Sam is a piano tuner and Victoria is a piano player and Danny’s mother was a piano player as well. So there is Mozart which is always nice.

Sam (Freeman) and Bart (Hoskins) are the two different fathers, or masters, representing two different ways to approach the role of top dog. One rules by fear, one by love. Danny responds to them differently as you would expect and this too actually works very well.

There is quite simply a lot going on in this movie. Much more than you would expect. It is a complex mixture of genres and themes, set in an undefined city at a non defined time and just outside the realm of reality. And stellar performances all around. Definitely something for those of us who like the genremix and enjoy seeing performers go outside the box. Oh, and not for the faint of heart – because the fighting is quite brutal.

Well worth seeing.

Mule