Unconvincing Underdog Story Dogman Is Both Too Strange and Not Strange Enough

Six years since a string of ultimately cleared or dropped allegations towards a director with an irrefutably suspicious track record, and five years since a memory-holed film titled Anna co-starring Cillian Murphy, Luc Besson makes his less-than-triumphant return with Dogman. The mind who brought us Léon: The Professional and The Fifth Element saw success with his nonsensical sci-fi film Lucy back in 2014, but whiffed it with the bloated Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets three years later. Ruining the goodwill that allowed him a larger budget, the French director has gone back to producing more humble films, as seen with the Caleb Landry Jones-starring Dogman, a film which has been compared unfavorably to Joker. And indeed, the screenplay has many Joker-esque qualities: An outcast mistreated, abused and abandoned since childhood who then turns to an eccentric, costume-donning life of crime, with a lead actor giving a performance that exists somewhere in the murky space between genuinely impressive and completely confusing.

Dogman opens with the arrest of Doug (Jones), using a wheelchair, donning Marilyn Monroe drag, and driving a truck full of mangy dogs. The narrative charts his life through the events which led up to this moment in his cell, sitting across from psychologist Evelyn (Jojo T. Gibbs) as she prods Doug about just what happened to him to turn him into a criminal crossdresser without the use of his legs. 

Coming from an abusive, Bible-thumping family, Doug briefly shared a connection and love of music with a mother who eventually deserted him out of fear of Doug’s father. Prior to her departure, an argument at the dinner table sent Doug’s father into a vicious tizzy that got Doug locked up outside indefinitely in a pen full of angry, starved fight dogs. But the tortured child forms a lifelong, unbreakable bond with the animals—unfortunately, showing love to dogs only makes Doug’s father angrier. He shoots at the child one day, after Doug’s narc brother reveals that a litter of puppies have been birthed in the pen, and Doug is the only thing standing between the pups and his father’s insatiable bloodlust. The bullet damages Doug’s spine, permanently incapacitating his legs to the extent that every labored step he takes is actively killing him. So, he opts to spend the remainder of his days in a wheelchair with braces affixed to both disabled limbs.

The bullet also takes off one of Doug’s fingers, and it’s here that Doug finally escapes his prison. He utilizes one of his doggy friends to deliver the piece of DNA to police and land his father and brother in jail, because as you come to understand, Doug has such a profound connection with his animals that their brain capabilities transcend what has been scientifically known of dogs. Sent to an orphanage, Doug attaches onto a young theater actress hired to put on plays with the children. Their meaningful friendship allows Doug to both experience the type of human connection that he’s craved all his life and also become a deep appreciator of Shakespeare and melodrama. Doug then takes up residence at an abandoned high school where he houses his hoard of dogs and cares for them by working part time at a drag club. He also becomes something of a mafia don/dog rehome service, in which he both adopts dogs out and offers protection via his dogs to people who need it. 

All of this is explained laboriously via blandly shot back-and-forth conversations between Doug and Evelyn, the latter of whom continues to interview Doug past necessity for seemingly no reason other than curiosity. You might wonder if that’s some sort of ethics breach. But Evelyn’s character is so pathetically constructed that this was evidently not even a passing thought in Besson’s mind as he wrote one of Dogman’s two female characters, who both exist only to serve as narrative devices for the male protagonist. 

And speaking of the male protagonist, it’s difficult to know where to land on Jones. A solid actor who has, in part, made his career out of playing Off-Putting Little Motherfuckers (Get Out, Heaven Knows What, Nitram), Jones’ playing of this archetype takes the cake with Doug. But did I cringe at his performance because it was successfully repellant and odd, or because he wasn’t really the actor for the task? Jones is entirely unconvincing as a theatrical, Shakespeare-loving drag queen, like he’s laying it all on far too much; not just chewing the scenery but swallowing it too. It’s not fun to watch him do this, and it doesn’t engender sympathy for the character’s plight. It feels like he’s trying his best to do what he believes is an empathetic portrayal of an effeminate, abused, disabled man, without ever actually embodying the character’s humanity.

Dogman also utilizes an incredibly tired framing device: The protagonist who spends most of the film revealing their life’s story to the audience in flashback, a la Slumdog Millionaire or Vanilla Sky. In the case of Dogman, however, the distinction of “mentally unstable criminal revealing his backstory to an inquisitive psychologist while in jail” harkens specifically to its comical usage in two niche, low-budget horror films: 1987’s Silent Night, Deadly Night 2, and its lesser-known spiritual successor Freaky Farley. With these more humorous films in mind, this device prevented me from taking Dogman seriously at any point during its two-hour runtime. When Doug explains to Evelyn how his previously mentioned verbal infraction at the family dinner table caused his abusive father to indefinitely cage him outside with the fight dogs, I was reminded of Freaky Farley’s Farley (Matt Farley) being forced to dig holes in the woods by his overbearing father when he misbehaved, which led to Farley’s eventual life of peeping-tom deviancy. For Doug, this abusive neglect turned him into a crossdresser; an extremely questionable character arc that the film attempts to handle sensitively by making Doug accepted by the local drag community. But Dogman is a jamboree of offensiveness, adding in the stereotypical portrayal of Latino characters as gang members and a questionable depiction of disability. Compounded with dull plotting and a truly uninspired protagonist arc, Dogman is a curiosity of a comeback film that only makes you consider the virtues of director jail.

Director: Luc Besson
Writer: Luc Besson
Starring: Caleb Landry Jones, Jojo T. Gibbs, Christopher Denham, John Charles Aguilar, Grace Palma
Release Date: March 15, 2024

Brianna Zigler is an entertainment writer based in middle-of-nowhere Massachusetts. Her work has appeared at Little White Lies, Film School Rejects, Thrillist, Bright Wall/Dark Room and more, and she writes a bi-monthly newsletter called That’s Weird. You can follow her on Twitter, where she likes to engage in stimulating discussions on films like Movie 43, Clifford, and Watchmen.