No Need to Paws
You wouldn't know that Alex (Norman Kaye) had a fortune as the old inventor lives in a messy home with his dog PC. But when Anja (Sandy Gore) shows up to try and grab his money he gives a computer disk to his dog PC who flees before Alex meets his untimely demise. PC ends up being adopted by Zac (Nathan Cavaleri), a computer whiz kid who misses his late father whilst living with his mum and slacker stepfather who he doesn't trust. But thanks to Zac's geek ability he is able to give PC a voice, a Scottish one at that and together find themselves dealing with Anja.
Some movies work for more than one audience, take for example "Toy Story" as it was fun for children but at the same time offered up something for teens and grown ups as well. Unfortunately not all movies can achieve this and some movies clearly are made with just one audience in mind and "Paws" is clearly one of those movies. Here we have a dog who through an electronic device hidden in a bow tie can talk, there is a slightly lonely kid, a bit of a teen crush on the girl next door and of course we have an evil woman who whilst not up to the level of Cruella de Vil certainly has some similarities all of which are the basic ingredients for a children's movie. But it fails to come up with anything for any adult who either watches this with children or stumbles across it and put it on out of curiosity.
Now usually I would say there is nothing wrong with just aiming to entertain one audience demographic but sadly I don't think this movie even does that. The whole move seems lacking in humour with so much resting on the peculiarity of it being a movie set in Australia yet you have Billy Connolly's identifiable Scottish voice as that of PC. It isn't enough to make the movie work nor are the talents of the dog or dogs which play PC as whilst being able to react on command certainly makes for a cute dog doesn't make him entertaining.
What this all boils down to is that maybe for those around the age of 8 "Paws" was and maybe still is amusing but for anyone else there is very little to offer from this movie and even the voice work of Billy Connolly doesn't save it.
Tags: Dog Movies
