AIR BUD: GOLDEN RECEIVER - DVD review

Lately, Disney has been giving consumers a little more "bang" for their buck by including product tie-ins with DVD releases aimed at children. In this case, the bang is a whistle--a gold-plated cylindrical referee's whistle on a chain.

Kids, of course, will love it, but I'm not sure that this title needed an enticement. "Air Bud: Golden Receiver" (1998), the first sequel to "Air Bud" (1997), is one of the best of this litter of movies, though it still has more bark than the bite of the original movie.

"Air Bud" was shot in just a month with a budget estimated at $3 million, but the movie took in more than that the August weekend it opened. By December it had grossed more than $23 million. And that's not even counting the cottage industry that grew from this modest little film about a basketball-playing golden retriever who, in sequels, went on to play football, baseball, volleyball, and soccer. And just when you thought Disney had run out of sports, "Air Bud" became "Air Buddies," with the studio cranking out a batch of talking-pup movies featuring the offspring of Buddy.

Charles Martin Smith, who directed the first one, said he wanted no part of directing any sequels. Perhaps he knew it was a slippery slope. As it is, "Air Bud: Golden Receiver" is as close to being an identical twin to the first film without sharing exact DNA.

In the first "Air Bud," young Josh (Kevin Zegers) played a boy who felt isolated and marginalized because he was a new kid in a new town and school; in "Golden Receiver" Josh/Zegers is feeling marginalized again, this time because his widowed mom has started dating.

In "Air Bud," the dog's original owner is a clown who functions as the bad guy and takes Buddy away; in "Golden Receiver" it's a pair of Russians who are animal-napping exotic pets from the area for what appears to be an evil petting zoo/circus, and of course they set their sights on the dog they seen on TV.

In "Air Bud" the dog plays basketball, while in "Golden Receiver" the new man in Josh's mom's life, the new veterinarian in town, gives Josh a football that the dog can miraculously catch in his teeth as if it were a Frisbee. In the first film Buddy wreaks havoc when he rushes onto the basketball court but then wows the crowd with his "jump shot" and somehow gets to be a full-fledged member of a team that was a sorry bunch until the dog came along. In "Golden Receiver" the team is the biggest bunch of losers you've seen until Buddy comes along and scores a touchdown in his first game. The referee's arms go up, and the scoreboard rings up six points for the home team.

Of course, in the real world security guards would have grabbed the dog and, if it was linked to the home team, penalized the team for delay of game. In the real world, coaches wouldn't just throw down their clipboards week after week as a golden retriever runs circles around their players. They would have filed a protest with the league and it would be dog-gone. But of course this isn't the real world, and Disney has infused their live-action movies with slapstick from the very beginning.

Then too, in the real world, caricatures of the Boris and Natasha characters from the old "Rocky and Bullwinkle" show wouldn't have found their way into this film like Toons from Toontown mixing it up in "Roger Rabbit." Some of the slapstick scenes involving this dyspeptic duo can be downright painful to watch, if you're an adult. In the world of family movies, "Air Bud: Golden Receiver" is a marginal entry for that very reason. Even older children will have a hard time with some of the nonsense that goes on. But third-graders and under? They'll laugh their little tushies off.

The film stays its course much better with the realistic elements--especially the human relationships in the story. If you're in a blended family or a single parent wrestling with how to introduce the new person in your life to your kids, this wouldn't be a bad film to put on and then act dumb. I thought it was about a DOG. It is, but that's really the movie's gimmick. The through-line for the plot is the arc of Kevin's resistance to the veterinarian, Patrick (Gregory Harrison), who went from cool dude to icky guy when he started dating Mom (Cynthia Stevenson).

Brought in just for the fun of it were Tim Conway and Dick Martin to play sports announcers in the booth, but their schtick is tired and nowhere near as funny as Bob Uecker was in "Major League." Kid sidekick Tom (Shayn Solberg) has funny moments, but is largely so familiar that we ignore him as much as the girls in the film. And the two Russians (Perry Anzilotti and Nora Dunn) are played so over-the-top that they really do belong in a "Rocky and Bullwinkle" cartoon. The most successful comic relief comes from veteran character actor Robert Costanzo, who's fondly remembered for bringing great zest into the small role of "waiter" in "Forget Paris." As the rotund, forever-eating coach of the Timberwolves, he manages just the right balance of comedy and father-figure warmth.

The other star of the movie is British Columbia, where filming took place. In frame after frame, peninsulas and quaint towns are so visually stunning that you almost want to move there. Cinematography Mike Southon, who did the camerawork for the first "Air Bud," returns to do a fine job of capturing the sprawling ambience of the location, the intimate moments between humans, and the wild action on the field.

It's all innocuous enough, with a formulaic plot that's predictable even if you hadn't seen the first "Air Bud." The situation (new man in mom's life, Tom urging him to play football to "get girls") quickly unfolds with Air Bud emerging as the team's star and the one to lead them to the championship game. Along the way, the dognapping sideplot is thrown in more for comic relief than narrative obstacle, and Kevin wrestles with his mom's new relationship. And naturally, there's a feel-good ending.

"Air Bud" was a solid 7 out of 10 in my book, and while this carbon copy lacks the drama, pathos and believability of the original, it's still a lot more entertaining than most critics would have you believe. I'd give it a 6 without feeling overly generous, especially given the intended audience: kids.

Video:
Disney quality control is a steady and reliable operation, and almost all of the DVDs that come out of the studio have the same 7 out of 10 look to them, with true-looking colors, relatively little grain for a standard def release, and just the right amount of light. "Air Bud: Golden Receiver" is presented in 1.85:1 widescreen, "enhanced" for 16x9 television monitors.

Audio:
Same with the audio, which is a Dolby Digital 5.1 that sufficiently uses the rear speakers and delivers a relatively distortion-free sound. It's nothing that wows you, but it's also nothing that strikes you as being deficient in any way.

Extras:
The whistle is the big bonus feature, and the DVD is packaged in a slim clear keep-case-the kind you normally see in TV season sets-and the cardboard case that it comes in has a huge cut-out. Take out the whistle and this slim case just rattles around. My guess is that people will just recycle the box and shelve the thin plastic case with their other Disney movies. And that raises an interesting question. With space at a premium, might Disney and other studios shift to a slim case for all their releases? Or one that doesn't have the height, so more shelves can fit in a defined space?

The other bonus feature is a stupid one: the "Buddies" offering commentary on the "All-New Sports Channel Play-by-Play." Even kids who like the buddies aren't going to like a replay of the football scenes--a recap, really, of the football plot in a nutshell. And I have to say that he B-Dawg character and his skate-punk rap-speak is just plain annoying. A better feature would have been a PSA about golden retrievers, in case families get inspired to make a trip to the pet store.

Bottom Line:
The sequels to "Air Bud" aren't as good as the original, but I'd still rather watch one of these for family movie night than ANY of the Air Buddies movies.