There’s a reason dogs are called man’s best friend, and Hollywood has spent decades putting that relationship to good use. Sometimes the dog is a faithful companion, sometimes they’re a partner in crime, and sometimes they’re an enormous slobbering nightmare who destroys your house. Whatever the case, put a guy and a dog together on the big screen and chances are we’re going to get attached.
The latest entry in the genre is Heart of the Beast, which is now playing in theaters and reunites Brad Pitt with his Fury director, David Ayer. Pitt stars as Special Forces officer James Belmont, who becomes stranded in the Alaskan wilderness following a plane crash with only his combat dog, Odin, by his side. Naturally, what follows is a brutal fight for survival, but the heart of the movie is the bond between the two as they depend on each other to make it home alive. You can check out a review from our own Chris Bumbray right here.
With Heart of the Beast reminding us just how effective the man and dog formula can be, we thought we’d take a look back at a handful of other movies that put that special relationship front and centre. From slobbery buddy-cop comedies to post-apocalyptic weirdness, here are five great man and dog buddy movies you should check out.
Turner and Hooch (1989)
Scott Turner (Tom Hanks) is a painfully neat small-town detective whose life gets turned upside down when he takes in Hooch, a huge, slobbering Dogue de Bordeaux who witnessed his owner’s murder. Turner wants nothing to do with the destructive mutt, but Hooch may be the only witness who can help him crack the case.
If you’re talking man and dog buddy movies, you’ve got to include Turner & Hooch. It’s the gold standard for the whole “uptight guy gets paired with an animal who destroys everything he owns” formula, and a big reason it works is Tom Hanks.
Turner likes order. He likes cleanliness. He likes everything exactly where it’s supposed to be. Hooch, meanwhile, is a 100-pound drool-covered wrecking ball. The dog trashes his house, ruins his routine, and generally makes Turner’s life a living hell, but hey, that’s the perfect recipe for becoming best friends. Too bad that didn’t work for Hanks and Henry Winkler.
Hanks completely sells Turner’s growing attachment to Hooch, which makes the final stretch hit much harder than you’d expect from what is otherwise a goofy Disney cop comedy. It was followed by a Disney+ series starring Josh Peck in 2021, but it didn’t catch on and was cancelled after a single season.
Togo (2019)
During the 1925 diphtheria outbreak in Nome, Alaska, musher Leonhard Seppala (Willem Dafoe) and his aging lead dog Togo embark on the most dangerous stretch of a desperate relay to deliver life-saving antitoxin across the frozen wilderness.
Balto may have gotten the statue, the animated movie, and most of the glory, but Togo makes a pretty convincing argument that we’ve been celebrating the wrong dog. Maybe that’s a little too far; all dogs deserve to be celebrated.
The Disney+ film tells the story of Leonhard Seppala and Togo, the sled dog who led his team through the longest and most dangerous portion of the famous 1925 serum run to Nome. Willem Dafoe is great as Seppala, a tough, no-nonsense musher who initially wants nothing to do with the uncontrollable lil pup who keeps escaping just so he can follow the sled team. Naturally, that annoying little runt turns out to be the best dog he ever had.
The movie is gorgeous, the Alaskan wilderness sequences are legitimately intense, and the relationship between Seppala and Togo never feels overly sentimental. And if you’re someone who gets emotional when an old dog looks tired, good luck. Togo is coming for you.
K-9 (1989)
Hotheaded narcotics cop Michael Dooley (James Belushi) is trying to bring down a major drug dealer when he’s forced to partner with Jerry Lee, a highly trained German Shepherd with a serious attitude problem. Unfortunately for Dooley, Jerry Lee doesn’t seem particularly interested in taking orders.
1989 was apparently the year Hollywood decided audiences desperately needed movies about cops arguing with dogs, because K-9 arrived just a few months before Turner & Hooch.
The difference is that James Belushi’s Dooley isn’t some straight-laced neat freak. He’s already a pain in the ass. So when you pair him with Jerry Lee, a stubborn German Shepherd who seems to enjoy making his life miserable, you basically get a traditional buddy-cop movie where one of the partners just happens to enjoy sniffing butts.
The drug-dealer plot is pretty standard ’80s cop stuff, but that’s not why anybody remembers K-9. You remember Belushi getting increasingly pissed off at a German Shepherd who clearly thinks he’s an idiot. That’s the movie, but audiences must have loved it, because Jerry Lee and Belushi eventually returned for two sequels, K-911 and K-9: P.I. You can’t keep a good dog down.
Dog (2022)
Former Army Ranger Jackson Briggs (Channing Tatum) is tasked with transporting Lulu, a traumatized military working dog, down the Pacific Coast to attend the funeral of her former handler before she’s set to be euthanized.
Based on the title and trailer, Dog looked like it would be 100 minutes of Channing Tatum getting humiliated by a Belgian Malinois. And to be fair, there’s certainly plenty of that.
Lulu destroys his truck, makes dating basically impossible, and generally treats Briggs like someone she would happily abandon at the nearest rest stop. But of course, Dog turns out to have a lot more going on than its goofy road-movie setup suggests.
Briggs and Lulu are both veterans, each carrying baggage from their time in combat. Briggs is desperate to prove he’s ready to return to service, while Lulu has been deemed too dangerous to handle. Neither one is particularly good at dealing with civilians, and neither seems interested in admitting how badly they’re hurting.
Tatum is surprisingly effective here (he also co-directed the film), especially once Briggs’ macho exterior starts cracking, and the movie manages to balance comedy and emotion without becoming unbearably schmaltzy.
A Boy and His Dog (1975)
In a post-apocalyptic wasteland, teenager Vic (Don Johnson) travels with Blood, an intelligent dog with whom he can communicate telepathically. When Vic is lured into a bizarre underground society, he quickly learns that civilization might be even more screwed up than the wasteland outside.
If Turner & Hooch is the wholesome version of the man-and-dog buddy movie, A Boy and His Dog is what happens after somebody pours radioactive waste all over the formula. Yep, this one’s a little… different.
Based on the Harlan Ellison novella, this 1975 cult oddity stars a very young Don Johnson as Vic, an amoral, horny, and not-particularly-bright survivor wandering the post-apocalyptic wasteland with Blood, his telepathic dog. Blood is smarter and more educated than Vic. Their constant bickering is hilarious, and somehow the movie’s central relationship winds up being weirdly convincing despite everything else going on around them.
The movie is very much a product of its era, particularly in its treatment of women, and some viewers are going to bounce right off it. But there’s no denying how strange, nasty, funny, and memorable it is.
Then there’s that ending. If you know, you know.
—
At the end of the day, they’re all good dogs, so why not let us know some of your favourite man and dog buddy movies in the comments below.
The comment section exists to allow readers to discuss the article constructively and respectfully, focused on the topic at hand.
What’s Not Allowed