There is a small moment early in Strays that will land with anyone who has actually lived with a dog. Bug, a scrappy little Boston Terrier voiced by Jamie Foxx, is walking alone through the woods, talking himself up, insisting he is not scared. A single leaf drifts down. He flinches, then mutters a curse at it. That is the whole movie in five seconds: not the profanity, but the truth of it. If you have owned this dog, and everyone has owned some version of this dog, you know exactly the little full-body reset a pup performs after being ambushed by absolutely nothing.
Released in August 2023, Strays sells itself as the R-rated dog comedy, the one where the animals swear and hump couches and eat questionable street pizza. All of that is there. But the crude packaging hides the film’s real achievement, which is quieter and, frankly, more impressive than any punchline: it may be the most behaviorally honest dog movie ever made. Most dog films dress animals up as tiny people. This one does the opposite, and it is funnier for it.
A dog movie for adults, built out of real dog behavior
The setup is a filthy inversion of a familiar formula. Instead of a kids’ adventure like Homeward Bound or a tearjerker like Marley & Me, Strays asks what a dog movie would look like if it were profane, and aimed squarely at grown-ups. The plot follows Reggie, a relentlessly devoted Border Terrier mix voiced by Will Ferrell, who cannot grasp that his awful owner Doug (Will Forte) despises him. After Doug dumps him far from home, Reggie falls in with Bug and his crew, a pampered Australian Shepherd named Maggie (Isla Fisher) and a gentle Great Dane therapy dog named Hunter (Randall Park), and sets off on an absurd revenge quest back to Doug.
The jokes about dogs saying bad words are the surface. The deeper humor comes from the film simply observing what dogs do. Director Josh Greenbaum, who made the equally unhinged Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar, and writer Dan Perrault reportedly built the comedy around a running question: what genuinely funny dog behaviors had they witnessed that they could give a voice to? The answers are what make the movie sing.
The trick most dog movies skip: use the real dog
Here is the production detail that matters most to anyone who cares about animals on screen. Roughly 95 percent of what you see in Strays is a real dog, not CGI, with about four different dogs sharing each starring role. Greenbaum has said he deliberately leaned on actual canine behavior rather than digital effects, in part because he wanted to avoid the uncanny, over-animated look, no computer-furrowed brows, no cartoon expressions grafted onto an adult comedy.
That choice shows. When a character is confused, the film reaches for a real head tilt instead of a rendered frown. And because the voice actors recorded after the dogs were filmed, they could improvise off whatever the animals actually did, which is how the cursed leaf made the final cut. According to accounts of the shoot, that flinch was not scripted; the dog playing Bug, named Benny, genuinely got startled, and rather than cut it, Greenbaum kept it and let the line follow the behavior.
The details only a dog person would catch
The movie is stuffed with small, accurate flourishes. There is a sequence where the gang has to bed down on the road and cannot settle until they have circled and nested and rearranged their spot to some invisible standard, going on well past the point of reason, exactly like a real dog’s pre-sleep ritual. It is a joke that only works because it is true.
Then there is the sprinkler bit. Greenbaum reportedly thought it would be funny if one of the dogs bit at spraying water, a habit he had seen in retrievers, so the trainers found a Boston Terrier who loved doing exactly that. As the story goes, the dog had precisely one talent, attacking a sprinkler, delivered it in a single glorious five-minute burst, and then effectively retired for the rest of the shoot to lounge around. The lead trainer, Mark Forbes, was a veteran of dog-driven productions like 101 Dalmatians and Marley & Me, and the craft shows in how natural the performances feel. It is worth noting, too, that Reggie, the macho hero, was primarily played by a female dog named Sophie, a nice reminder that the tough-guy energy on screen is pure acting.
The verdict
Commercially, Strays was a modest release, grossing around $36 million worldwide against mixed reviews, and it is emphatically not for kids or for anyone allergic to crude humor. But judged on the thing it set out to do, capture the genuine, ridiculous, deeply specific weirdness of dogs, it succeeds better than films with ten times the sentiment. The gross-out comedy is the Trojan horse. Inside it is a surprisingly loving, surprisingly accurate portrait of what our dogs are actually like when they think no one is scripting them: brave and ridiculous, loyal to a fault, and forever ready to lose a fight with a falling leaf.
References
- Universal Pictures. “Strays.” Theatrical release, August 18, 2023.
- Box Office Mojo. “Strays (2023).” IMDbPro.
- American Humane. “No Animals Were Harmed: Guidelines for the Safe Use of Animals in Filmed Media.”
