Dog Eat Dog Review

Dog Eat Dog follows a group of ex-cons led by Troy (Nicolas Cage) in their attempt to take an infant hostage in order to get a big pay day. His team consists of two other members who are quite crazy including Mad Dog (Willem Dafoe) and Diesel (Christopher Matthew Cook). The film opens with a fairly hardcore yet trippy scene of Mad Dog going just crazy and that was well done giving him a dark edge while hopefully setting up the rest of the story.

Things only get worse from that point though with a long opening scene that felt boring and out of place considering their main eventual goal. This is of course to complete an easy job of capturing an infant, which for professional criminals felt as though they were very amateur. That aspect comes from a mix of just walking around without any sort of tactical approach and that they don't seem to care what happens ever.

It then continues on meandering with smaller discussions over what happened and an eventual ending sequence. I was completely lost throughout the entire film noticing so many left plot lines and felt that it just wasn't cohesive. This even caused me to go back and skip around in it to get some context of what happened.

While nothing felt cohesive in the story the film was really well shot featuring a number of great cinematic scenes. I also liked the use of color in a number of the sets and the unique style done in others. The gore was also impressive with the action scenes being great to watch as well.

There was a nice mixture of finesse with those action moments being slightly drawn out for better impact. It's just that it didn't come together well having many poorly paced segments and a narrative that never made sense. The acting was fine with each of the leads doing the tough guy well and Dafoe played a psychopathic type character extremely well.

The Conclusion

Dog Eat Dog had some great style to it though the film completely lacked substance. It was hard to follow, very slowly paced at the start and despite the infant being a main focus it really wasn't at all. Nothing particularly made sense with some story elements that never came together. There were a few decent moments, but it never made it enjoyable and wasn't interesting.

Dog Eat Dog Review at Home with Streamed Viewing
Screening Provided by Katrina Wan PR

Rating Overall: 3.8