Old Dogs [3-Disc Edition] – Blu-ray Disc Review

March 5, 2010 – 3:31 PM - Posted by: Brendan Surpless

Tags: Digital Copy, Disney, DVD, Ella Bleu Travolta, John Travolta, Kelly Preston, Lori Loughlin, Matt Dillion, Robin Williams, Seth Green, Walt Becker

has an average rating of 5.1 on IMDb
1080p in AVC MPEG-4 on a 50gb disc
DTS-HD 5.1 Master Audio
are so-so with DVD & Digital Copy
–
– 2009
– 88 minutes
– Disney
–
Street Date: March 9th, 2010
This uses 22.4GB for the movie out of 29.7GB total.

Overall Verdict – Mediocre Film/Good Disc

Buy it for $24.99 @ Amazon.com

— Review written by: Brendan Surpless

Trailer:

The Movie Itself was directed by Walt Becker (known for directing “Wild Hogs“). Dan (Robin Williams) and Charlie (John Travolta) are best of friends and business partners having been that way for some thirty years. Both started a sports marketing company and are about to embark on their biggest deal, one worth near $47 Million Dollars. One day, while at a meeting with their prospective Japanese client, Charlie recalls a story 7 years ago about Dan. It turns out that Dan’s wife left him and Charlie, not wanting to see his best friend sad, decided to travel down to Miami. Well Dan ended up meeting a special someone, which brings us to our current time period. Turns out that Dan has 2 children, naturally which he doesn’t know anything of. And the mother of his children are about to go to jail for some demonstration gone wrong. And Dan now has to take care of the kids! Oh yeah! All while trying to close this deal of a lifetime! Comedy mayhem ensues right? Well, partially as there are a few funny hahaha moments here and there. But in the end, the film falls flat as it tries too hard to succeed.

Let’s get this one out of the way. I will easily admit that I did laugh more than a few times during “Old Dogs“, which surprised the heck out of me. Starring at the cover as it sat on my coffee table, the movie looked plainly bad, something that we’ve seen before but only good. I went into this with an open mind and found myself chuckling within the first 10 minutes or so (mostly at the tanning sequence). I figured this was a good sign! Then I found myself laughing again at the pill switch sequence. Again, great success! But then the film took a turn and instantly became a chore to watch. What exactly occurred you might be wondering? Well, it’s after this pill scene that Dan realizes that he should be a good father and try to be there for his children. This is where “Old Dogs” becomes plainly bad and almost an insult. Actors like Travolta and Williams are great at what they do (especially Williams with the very recent, very dark “World’s Greatest Dad“). This makes me wonder if this was purely a paycheck type film as one can’t fathom these two looking at the script only to go ‘wow, that’s so funny!’.

In closing, “Old Dogs” certainly does have a few funny jokes, but ultimately ends up falling flat as the story is rather mundane and very formulaic. I can’t really imagine a target audience for this film that would find this film suitable, but I do suppose they are out there.

Video Quality on this release is in full 1080p using the AVC MPEG-4 codec on a BD-50 (50 gigabyte dual-layered Blu-ray Disc) in the 1.85:1 aspect ratio. The film tends to use the kind of color palette that focus on colors on the brighter side of the spectrum. We have the blues of Dan’s shirt, the whites of Charlie’s apartment, all of which come off quite well. We do have moments where darker colors do get to shine, but not as impressively as their brighter counterparts. Take in case the sequence in Miami. The blacks do look good enough but lack real “pop” or solid detail. Perhaps this is because the scene is presented in kind of a ‘rush’, so we can’t really stop and focus on any one particular item. Speaking of detail, minus these scenes, detail is quite impressive throughout, especially in wide shots. There isn’t much grain to speak of but I do have one item that is worth mentioning.

Right around the 40:35 mark, where Dan and Charlie enter Charlie’s bathroom to take their pills for the day, the image tends to have a kind of falter to it. I’m not 100% sure what exactly this is, but I can best describe it as a flicker of sorts. The oddity really is that this is the only sequence where this occurs, I didn’t notice this anywhere else in the film. Speaking to my co-founder/editor Justin Sluss, we figured it might be how the film was shot, but IMDb doesn’t have much “information“. Another item we discussed was that Disney, the studio distributing this title, had many other higher profile titles in the queue that could have received more preference than this one. Titles like “The Princess and the Frog“, “Toy Story” and “Toy Story 2“. This may be the reason or it may not be. If you have more information on how this was filmed, feel free to chime in via the comment section below. Still besides this instance, I was pleased with this image. All in all this earns a solid “4 Star Rating.”

Audio Quality on this release is presented in DTS-HD 5.1 Master Audio. With this being a comedy, the overall impact of this soundtrack tends to falter mainly due to issues that seem to effect many other films like this. Dialogue is well reproduced with no instance of drop out. The soundfield does open up a bit thanks in part to background activity in many sequences. Dynamics are loud and resonant via the rears speakers. LFE arrives courtesy of the varying musical moments or the gags and jokes that require a little boom here and there. Outside of these aforementioned areas though, the soundtrack displays the same problems that others in the genre do. This isn’t meant to come off as negative but rather a curious question. Why do all comedies lack any real impacting soundtrack? Just because there’s gags and laughs, doesn’t mean we can’t have a solid sound mix. With that little bit over, the film’s score is rather formulaic with punchy, happy tunes that don’t really do anything to make themselves stand out from scores we’ve heard countless times before. The provided DTS-HD track isn’t bad in the slightest sense, just it sounds like everything we’ve heard before. All in all this earns a “4 Star Rating“.

Bonus materials are presented in Hi-Def (HD) and Standard-Def (SD) video quality with Dolby Digital 5.1/2.0 Stereo sound @192kbps — unless otherwise noted below.

• DVD of the film is included in this “Combo” release. The DVD is in standard definition obviously and features Dolby Digital 5.1 sound.
• Digital Copy is included in this “Combo” release. The DVD-ROM contains the film itself and is compatible with both Mac and PC as well as iTunes and Windows Media portable devices.
• Young Dogs Learn Old Tricks: This runs close to 3 minutes and features the two young actors interviewing Travolta and Williams.
• Music Video: Here get a music video for the song “You’ve Been A Friend To Me” performed by Bryan Adams.
• Bloopers: A bland 3 minutes of bloopers are included, most of which just aren’t funny at all.
• Deleted Scenes: 4 minutes of deleted scenes and one alternate ending are shown. The scenes themselves were wisely cut, but the alternate ending is a bit more interesting.
• Music Video: Here we get a music video for the song “Every Little Step” performed by John Travolta and Ella Bleu Travolta.
• Audio Commentary by Director Walt Becker, Producer Andrew Panay and Writers David Diamond and David Weissman:

Overall, the bonus materials are decent with a Digital Copy and a DVD included. The actual features are very by-the-book but do provide a few laughs here and there but are pretty short.

Blu-ray Disc packaging:

Screenshots:

NOTE: The full-sized 1920×1080 files are in a .PNG file format and uncompressed. Bare with the slow loading times, keep in mind these files are at least 1MB (1 megabyte) in size each.

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