A Dog’s Perfect Christmas review: Netflix kicks off holiday movie season with a whimper

Dennis Quaid is wasted in a predictable drama with a cute basset hound and not much more

US election results may still be trickling in, but Netflix has already made the call: ’tis the season! Just four days into November, with leaves still on the trees and much of the country stuck in T-shirt weather, the streaming service has decided to hit full-send on the longest possible window for cookie-cutter cheer and fake snow; as of now, Christmas is a go. And with an opening salvo like the plainly titled A Dog’s Perfect Christmas, one would think the company has given itself a running head start to the holiday mass market. Or, at least, a cute-enough face, courtesy of one sweet basset hound and a corgi puppy, to possibly work as a naked attention ploy.

A Dog’s Perfect Christmas, from A Dog’s Purpose creator W Bruce Cameron, does at least have the decency to set the scene before Thanksgiving and acknowledge said ploy; if there is one thing a grumbling man named “Sander Goss” (a constipated-looking Dennis Quaid) and I can agree on, it’s that they keep starting Christmas too early.

It does not, unfortunately, have much else to distinguish it from the many piles of fluff reused and reorganized with each passing season – not as self-knowing as a Lindsay Lohan star vehicle, or as mind-numbingly ludicrous as snowman-turned-ripped real boy winner Hot Frosty, nor even as baseline exotic as Minka Kelly’s trip to France last year in the otherwise flat Champagne Problems. Though there is not one but two dogs, a medical crisis, a handsome teenage love interest and possibly real snow, A Dog’s Perfect Christmas is almost resistant to attention, technically workable on the surface but totally indistinct, the Amazon-sponsored product of sickly sweet holiday movies.

That is no offense to the genuinely adorable basset hound Winstead, whose droopy pink eyes muster what little feeling is to be wrung from this family drama, of sorts. As voiced by Thomas Haden Church, however, Winstead is a well-meaning dunce, for which people, things and especially smells are either “very good” or “very bad”. (“Merry Christmas”, his “favorite word”, is of course categorically good.) Part of the critical enjoyment of Netflix holiday fare is observing how blunt and mashed exposition can get; harried housewife Juliana (Kathleen Rose Perkins) telling her teenage daughter Ello (Brooke Lena Johnson, who could pull off 30) that her widowed grandfather has lived with them for weeks because “he spent all of his money on medical treatments and now he was forced to move in here” certainly qualifies for something.

Once the requisite “OK boomer” line is dropped at Sander, things get down to business: father Hunter (a wasted Milo Ventimiglia) is too busy trying to impress his mercurial new boss (director Cathryn Michon) to help his stressed-out wife, the “Patrick Mahomes of Christmas”, around the house. Sander is grieving. Ello is petulant. Her younger siblings, the twins, are toddlers. What is a basset hound who just wants everyone to get along and be happy to do?

This suggests plot, and there is some. But though scenes herk and jerk through soap and comedy beats like a crooked Christmas train around the tree, everything feels incredibly low stakes, even when Juliana gets knocked unconscious by an infection that could lead to sepsis, a life-threatening condition her family members treat with about the same severity as a sprained ankle for half the movie. (They do, at least, deign to put up the Christmas decorations for her, to a soothing cover of Joni Mitchell’s River.) Until, of course, things take a dramatic southward turn, which does compel one to look away from the phone, if only just to see how closely things will swerve toward The Pitt.

Not so close, of course, as this is a Netflix Christmas movie. And as such, there are still pockets of flavor within the styrofoam packaging: a couple of enjoyable scenes of suitable ice dancing between Ello and new hockey guy Sean (Ethan Loomis); a needle drop of Ariana Grande’s infinitely listenable Christmas classic Santa Tell Me; every time Mary Steenburgen’s Claire, a widowed townswoman, hits a scene like a sip of eggnog, substantial and a little spicy. The gazebos/town squares/suburban streets of “Traverse City” did not immediately scan as Canada (in this case, good ol’ British Columbia), which is a plus.

But that can only count for so much, when the bar is already low. Still, I suppose, barely clearing it is the aim. A Dog’s Perfect Christmas will probably do numbers as it hits the overflowing holiday stockpile on second screen – now a holiday tradition, like any other.

A Dog’s Perfect Christmas is streaming on Netflix