*/**** Image A Sound A
starring James Belushi, Gary Basaraba, Kim Huffman, Jody Racicot
screenplay by Gary Scott Thompson and Ed Horowitz
directed by Richard J. Lewis
by Walter Chaw Much more interesting than talking about a film called K-9: P.I. is talking about exactly the kind of mind it takes to embrace the idea of a standard buddy picture composed of one half mangy dog and one half German Shepherd not once, not twice, but thrice. On the night of their retirement, Dooley (James Belushi) and Jerry Lee (King) break up a microchip heist, which, of course, makes them the prime suspects of the crime in the eyes of the evil FBI. The feds are always wicked bumblers in films of this breed; the police chiefs always give the heroes a hard time; and there are always femmes fatale to briefly distract the hero from the super-bland "appropriate" love interest.
Discussing the plot of K-9: P.I., in other words, is a pretty useless thing to do: if you don't know that this film is a formula wrapped around moments in which a Belushi gets to be disgusting and a dog gets to be adorable, you're beyond my help–beyond any help. A better use of time would be to just recount very quickly a few scenes and then agree never to speak of this again. Jerry Lee, because he's a highly-trained police dog, eats a precious computer chip that somehow makes him constipated and flatulent, inspiring Dooley to feed Jerry Lee a natural laxative cocktail (beans, mineral oil, curry powder) and then to strain the liquid excretion in a colander with no real motivation to do so: He doesn't know, you see, that Jerry Lee has cleverly eaten a piece of silicon.
Jerry Lee, again because he's a highly-trained police dog, impregnates a fetching she-Shepherd because she's dressed up as the canine equivalent of a cheap hussy (standard poodle). And Dooley, because he's a slob, offers a dirty shirt to the femme fatale when she weeps piteously. All of this isn't so much funny as aggressively unfunny, highlighting the difficulty of offering a viable critique of the picture by demonstrating that it doesn't matter at all what I say about this film. If you're really renting something titled K-9: P.I., you're not interested in discretion in your entertainment choices, you're interested in Anne Geddes, John Grisham, and Thomas Kincaid.
What was actually sort of diverting for a time was attempting to figure out why director Richard J. Lewis kept trying to find humour in Belushi picking small things out from among other things (the abovementioned fecal dig, and a peculiar bit involving the excavation of raisins from Raisin Bran). My guess is that it has something to do with the innate lizard-brain appeal of seeing a great ape plucking at nits. With the excrement mining taking on metaphorical resonance, this little bit of primatology is the only thing remotely resembling subtext in the rote mess K-9: P.I..
THE DVD
Presented in a more than serviceable 1.85 anamorphic transfer, K-9: P.I. boasts of good shadow detail (important for the number of night scenes), nice vibrant colours, and true flesh tones on DVD. There are no edge-enhancement issues and the print is flawless. Also nice, though misused, are the Dolby 5.1 and DTS mixes, which rely on the centre channel too heavily, leaving bass and surround-channel separation fitful at best and occasionally surprising–as in a sudden dialogue explosion in the rear left in chapter 12. (It's not a good surprise.) A 10-minute featurette features shots from each of the three K-9 films along with some excessively unhelpful information about how neat dogs are. A trailer for the film as well as cast & crew biographies round out the disc.
95 minutes; PG-13; 1.85:1 (16×9-enhanced); English DD 5.1, English DTS 5.1; CC; English, Spanish subtitles; DVD-9; Region One; Universal
