The Art of Racing in the Rain (2019)
Directed by Simon Curtis
A family dog – with a near-human soul and a philosopher's mind – evaluates his life through the lessons learned by his human owner, a race-car driver.
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A race car flavored companion to the reincarnating puppies of A Dog’s Purpose (2017) and A Dog’s Journey (2019), if you will.
Director Simon Curtis’ decade-in-the-making “The Art of Racing in the Rain” is a simple-minded yet skillfully manipulative answer to that question — featuring the bare-feet-in-loose-gravel voice of Kevin Costner as Enzo, the canine companion to Seattle-based race car driver Denny Swift (Milo Ventimiglia) — that’s not as peppy as “A Dog’s Purpose” nor as droll as “Isle of Dogs,” and nowhere near as inane as “Look Who’s Talking Now” but still effective on its own dog-forsaken terms.
Advertised as being “from the studio that brought you Marley & Me,” The Art of Racing in the Rain is such a story told from the perspective of a wizened old pooch, but this one originates from a bestselling novel by Garth Stein, not one written by W. Bruce Cameron, the mastermind behind the recent slate of dreadfully insulting “inspirational doggo” pictures A Dog’s Purpose, A Dog’s Way Home, and A Dog’s Journey, all of which are reprehensible, and two of which came out this year alone.
Mark Bomback’s script, based on the novel by Garth Stein, takes the structure of Marley and Me, which follows the life of a family during the lifetime of their dog, and infuses it with the voice-over that’s supposed to represent the pooch’s inner monologue, à la recent sleeper hits like A Dog’s Purpose and A Dog’s Journey.
Screenwriter Mark Bomback, like W. Bruce Cameron (whose books and movies include A Dog's Purpose ), tells the story from Enzo's point of view, which should not be a bad thing.
And yet, The Art of Racing in the Rain is the third in a recent string of films (alongside A Dog’s Purpose , its sequel A Dog’s Journey , and the unrelated A Dog’s Way Home ) to grace the canine kind with a little more scholarly insight.
Written for the screen by Mark Bomback (The Wolverine, War for the Planet of the Apes), The Art of Racing in the Rain carries over the broader narrative strokes of Stein's source material - though, thankfully, it abandons the novel's most problematic subplot (one that involves a teenaged girl named Annika) in favor of a melodramatic, but otherwise fitting substitute.
From the opening scene Curtis (My Week with Marilyn, Goodbye Christopher Robin) and Bomback (Unstoppable, The Wolverine, War for the Planet of the Apes) make it known that the dog will eventually die years down the road in this story, instead of always toying with the audience’s emotions and repeatedly killing and abusing animals just to wring a few extra tears from viewers’ eyes.
Screenwriter Mark Bomback, who has a resume peppered with action film credits — “The Wolverine,” Unstoppable,” “Total Recall” — was an odd choice to adapt Garth Stein’s best seller.
Later recognizing that Denny turns into skids before the skid can take control of the car proves no more illuminating than "The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift."