Review: Wiener-Dog (2016)

Let me tell you about 2 of my favourite things. Number 1: Dogs. All dogs, to be perfectly honest. I’m the type of person who, whilst walking in the woods will say hello to every dog I meet, and completely ignore the human being on the other side of the lead. Dachshund’s in particular are extremely cute. Number 2: Those movies about multiple stories where they all end up linking together in some way. Okay, what I actually mean is that I love Love Actually, but you get the picture. So when I find out about a movie called Wiener-Dog, a movie about a little dachshund who changes the lives of a whole bunch of people, I’m hyped.

How then, can a movie let me down so badly?! Here, let me find you this movie’s description, straight from IMDB: A dachshund passes from oddball owner to oddball owner, whose radically dysfunctional lives are all impacted by the pooch.

Hmm, not quite. Let me give it a go: The unluckiest dachshund in the world gets passed on from one bad owner to the next, people who don’t deserve the bundle of happiness that is Wiener-Dog.

Perhaps I’m being harsh. Let me recap on the ‘oddball owners’ that Wiener-Dog gets passed on to.

Oddball Owners #1: A father picks up Wiener-Dog from the local shelter as a gift for his cancer-suffering child. Proceeds to keep her locked in a cage until ‘her will has been broken’. Parents leave said child alone in the house whilst they attend a yoga class, and the kid feeds the hungry little dog far too many granola bars, causing mass diarrhea. Father takes Wiener-Dog to the vets to be put down.

At this point the viewers are treated to a beautiful tracking shot of diarrhea in the street. It goes on for ages, and it’s accompanied by some lovely music, too. 

Oddball Owners #2: The vet’s assistant (Greta Gerwig) takes pity on Wiener-Dog, and steals her away. She names her doodie. As in, well, poo. Great. She then decides to take a road trip with an old school friend who is possibly the world’s biggest douchebag, and leaves Wiener-Dog with her friend’s disabled family.

I’m not sure what happens at this point, because we head straight on to…

Oddball Owners #4: A struggling scriptwriter (Danny DeVito) now owns Wiener-Dog, but instead of giving her a loving home, he has a crazy turn and straps a bomb to her. I’m not even kidding. The bomb squad have to disarm her before she goes boom.

Oddball Owners #?: Wiener-Dog now lives with an old, blind lady, who has named her Cancer. Wonderful. Old lady’s horrible granddaughter comes to visit with her new boyfriend Fantasy (arghhh!) and asks for $10,000 to help him with his artistic dream. She relents, and terrible granddaughter leaves. What happens next is some bizarre epiphany involving multiple versions of old lady’s younger self.

I won’t spoil the ending for you. Even though this post should ensure that you’ll never want to see this movie, I won’t do that to you. It will go down in history as one of the biggest ‘WTF’ endings. 

From what I can gather, Wiener-Dog got a lot of good reviews. Perhaps the story is just too spiritual or artsy for me, but all it did was turn me into a giant ball of rage. At least I wasn’t bored at any point.