Old timers with old jokes make up Old Dogs, a 'comedy' that should have been put to sleep before production began. Presumably after the financial success of Wild Hogs, in which a bunch of ageing bikers took to the road for one last hurrah, someone thought it would be a sound idea to repeat the premise in another environment. Unfortunately they also decided to release the finished product on suspecting audiences all over the world.
John Travolta and Robin Williams (now 56 and 58 respectively) play two lifelong friends who run a successful sports advertising company. Just as they are on the brink of the biggest deal of their career (with some very uptight Japanese partners), two bombshells land in their laps in the form of a couple of kids who were the result of a brief affair that Williams' character has a few years earlier.
Cue the 'comedy': a succession of painfully realised set-ups in which the two stars demean themselves in the name of entertainment. There are plenty of off-colour gags involving the kids (homosexuality and paedophilia are happily covered), and much is made of the ageing process: (here's a joke in which Travolta unwittingly wets himself! Williams just got mistaken for the kids' grandfather - again!).
Travolta and Williams really need to take a good hard look at the material they are delivering before they actually deliver it, otherwise their careers will fade away into desperate pastiches of what they once were. Old Dogs is devoid of humour, is terribly forced, and is easily one of the worst films either of them has ever made.
Paul Hurley
