He’s helped by Gidget (voiced with asthmatic brilliance by Jenny Slate), who’s in love with Max for no reason other than that she sees him through the window sometimes and he seems like a good dog.
So the onus is mostly on Max (voiced by Louis C.K.) to carry the movie by doing an excellent impression of a good dog, and having an adventure. Approximately everything funny about this scenario has already been included in the trailer-the poodle who switches the music from Mozart to death metal when his owner goes out, the dachshund who uses the KitchenAid to scratch his belly. Promos for the movie have sold it as imagining an alternate reality wherein animals get up to zany hijinks while their owners are at work. Pets isn’t exactly faith-in-humanity restoring in the manner of Wall-E or Inside Out, but at the end of a week in which mankind has illustrated some of its most dismal traits, there’s something quietly therapeutic about spending 90 minutes with some nutty, heroic furballs on a hero’s journey with very low stakes. It has cats, too, and a moronic guinea pig, and a homicidal bunny, and a carnivorous hawk, and a pig with tattoos, but the primary reason for the movie’s appeal is its ability to comprehend the bizarre fidelity of dogs to their humans.
A snow-white cotton ball of a dog named Gidget who has attachment issues. A big, schlubby, emotionally inconsistent dog named Duke who looks a bit like a Snuffleupagus. The Secret Life of Pets is by no means great art, but what saves it from being a hugely predictable Toy Story ripoff/monomyth-by-numbers is simply the fact that it has dogs. Eddie the Jack Russell was indisputably the least irritating character on Frasier. White Fang saved a judge from a murderous criminal. When Odysseus returned to Ithaca and disguised himself as a beggar, Argos recognized his owner even when his best friend, Eumaeus, couldn’t. Great art has occasionally had the acuity to recognize that dogs are superior to humans.
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