Fixed review – Netflix's raunchy horny dog comedy wears thin

The Guardian

5 days ago

Dogs dry humping humans, and whatever else they can get between their legs, is always good for a laugh – at least when we're looking down on these adorable house pets, as they satisfy their base instincts, from above. Fixed, the filthy animated comedy unleashed on Netflix with a content warning that should apply to this review as much as the movie, both indulges in and tests our limits when it comes to that humour, largely by getting down (on all fours) and dirty with its hand-drawn canines.
Here's a movie with talking pets that rarely rises above a bull terrier's vantage point. Humans remain mostly out of frame. We see their legs – a regular scene of the crime – but never their faces. In the opening minutes, we're right there with Bull (voiced by Pitch Perfect's Adam DeVine), the movie's pudgy un-neutered protagonist, as he works hard to bust a nut on his household's nana.
The elderly woman is asleep on a sofa seat, her wrinkles sit still while he makes a mess of her stockings. The screen, and whatever objects are in its frame (like dog tags and dentures), rock to his rhythmic thrusting. His moans and Pornhub-rated gift for gab get louder with every back and forth, along with the squishing sound whenever he makes contact. It's a raucous bit, made all the more hilarious and uncomfortable because of how long it lasts. And it raises the question: would this behaviour be as cute and tolerable in real life if we considered how much fun dogs were having, and if we gave them human character traits and facial expressions, which in those moments can come off as downright depraved?
Fixed gets as much mileage as it can out of gags that largely centre on Bull's gonads, with its entire narrative built around a wild night out when he discovers his owner's plan to finally give him the snip. But that humour, and its shock value, wears thin in less time than it takes for Bull to satisfy his urges.
The movie can be a little too self-satisfied with its premise, mixing R-rated humour with the kind of quaint animation style – bright colours and defined black outlines – we remember from more innocent times. Tellingly, co-writer and director Genndy Tartakovsky (of Samurai Jack and Hotel Transylvania fame) first pitched the idea in 2009, when something like this might have felt risque and rare.
That was the same year The Hangover became an R-rated blockbuster comedy hinging on a similarly debauched premise, and more than a decade into South Park's success as late-night cartoon fare explicitly made for adults. It's also long before 2016's The Secret Life of Pets and Sausage Party, the former being far more imaginative and adventurous when mapping out social hierarchies in the domesticated animal space, and the latter – with its foul-mouthed grocery items – taking raunchy feature animation to its furthest limits.
The button pushing in South Park and Sausage Party also casts a wider net, regularly spilling over into socio- and geopolitics. I mean, South Park is rankling the Trump administration with far more pointed dick jokes. And who could forget the feuding bagel and lavash in Sausage Party, where the Israel-Palestine conflict was played out along shelf-space.
Fixed, on the other hand, rarely breaks orbit from the fixations of pets and strays, or at least what we imagine those to be. Beyond the horny animal stuff: there's marking their territory, sniffing each other's behinds, chasing squirrels (the violence of which is yet another thing where the humour of it is met with the unsettling shock of what happens when the predators catch their prey) and philosophizing over the unending appeal of bouncy (tennis) balls.
The limited scope often leaves Fixed feeling stretched and redundant, especially when we get to the umpteenth gag about Bull's testicles, which he imagines having Napoleonic personalities of their own. But at the same time, the movie's narrow obsession with Bull's balls is meaningfully consistent with the story it is telling.
Bull bases his entire personality on having testes, after all, so much so that he lords it over his dog park pals – Rocco (Idris Elba, doing wonderful work as a statuesque boxer licking his emotional wounds over being abandoned by his mother), Lucky (Bobby Moynihan as a beagle who can't stop devouring cat litter) and Fetch (Fred Armisen as a dachshund dressed for Instagram likes). The loyal squadron tolerate Bull's misguided arrogance and join along as he attempts to break free. They stumble through city back alleys and into a sordid sex club, which amuses with canine answers to pole dancing and orgies, while Bull tries to finally do the deed with something other than nana's legs.
As much as he derives his mojo from having balls, Bull is still so crippled with an inferiority complex that he can't go all the way with fellow canines. That's especially true when it comes to the show dog nextdoor, Honey, an Afghan hound voiced by Kathryn Hahn, who Bull adores but doesn't think he can satisfy, despite her flirtatious advances.
Their inhibited and surprisingly sentimental romance actually gives Fixed a bit of heart, leading Bull on a journey of self-discovery where he learns to let go of his balls and embrace everything he could become without them. Too bad it takes so long for Bull, and the movie, to heed that very lesson.
Fixed is available on Netflix 13 August