Channing Tatum Tweaks Progs, Salutes Vets in the Same Movie

‘T hank you for your service,” we tell our veterans, but it’s about as meaningful a wish as “Have a nice day.” That sense that no one actually cares about them helps push veterans grappling with post-traumatic stress to the margins after their final tour of duty, and their struggles are the subject of an honest, funny, sensitive, and gritty little road-trip movie called Dog, the directorial debut of Channing Tatum.

Tatum (who co-directed the movie with Magic Mike screenwriter Reid Carolin, also directing for the first time) plays Jackson Briggs, an internally and externally scarred former Army Ranger who is working at a sandwich shop but hoping to cash in with a high-paying gig in diplomatic security. The barrier is that he got shot up a few times overseas and now has lingering brain injuries. To be cleared for duty, he needs the approval of his former commanding officer, who refuses to grant it.

Until: A fellow soldier from Briggs’s old unit dies in a vehicular suicide, which in the context of the movie is a fairly unsurprising way for a vet to die. Briggs himself imagines dying by stealing a prop plane and flying it right into the sun: “Then I’d swan dive out the cockpit laughing my ass off all the way to Valhalla.” After toasting the fallen man, the former C.O. says he’ll clear Briggs to serve in the diplomatic post if Briggs will do a huge favor: Deliver the fallen soldier’s insane attack dog, with whom he served in Iraq and Afghanistan, to the funeral. The dog (a Belgian Malinois) is too skittish to fly, so Briggs must drive her from Fort Lewis in Washington State all the way down to Arizona. After the funeral, the no-longer-manageable and highly lethal dog is to be handed over to authorities to be put down.

So this road-trip comedy bears a structural resemblance to The Last Detail, and yes, I’m comparing Randy Quaid to a dog. (Quaid is more of a slobbering Newfoundland, I think.) As in that 1973 movie, a semi-functional military man must reluctantly turn over an outcast comrade to the Man, but not without some partying along the way. Tatum and Carolin (who wrote the script) draw an unforced parallel between the two trained killers: Both Briggs and Lulu, the dog, are ferociously good at their jobs, but the country no longer knows what to do with them. Talking to the dog about her troubles, Briggs reveals much about himself: “They don’t know what it takes to be a hero. If they knew the truth, it would scare the living s*** out of them.” For chuckles, dog and human like to watch videos (taken with the beast’s body cam) of Lulu ripping apart enemy combatants.

Which is exactly the kind of thing these characters would do after what they’ve been through, and it’s also exactly the kind of thing that would make them seem strange and frightening to a lot of Americans. What kind of Americans? Briggs goes to a bar to try to pick up a date, but instead, he gets an earful from every young wokette: “So at what point did you realize you were just a pawn of Big Oil?” asks one. Later, Briggs gets arrested for a hate crime in San Francisco because the dog attacks a Muslim. The cop who processes him, played with impeccably unearned arrogance by the excellent Bill Burr, brags that he, too, served, but it turns out that he was . . . an M.P. Briggs clearly thinks of these guys as the hall monitors of the military, practically the Hillary Clinton Brigades. “Oh, you were an M.P.?” he says nonchalantly, and the dismissiveness is hilarious.

The politically asymmetrical nature of which Americans dismiss veterans is not lost on Carolin and Tatum, and much of the movie amounts to walking a gauntlet through the craziness of Progressive America. When Briggs leaves Lulu in a (cool, safe) car at night, an animal-rights twerp seeks to break a window with a rock to let in some air, until Briggs advises him why this would be a bad idea. “Of course you threaten violence, you redneck!” says the self-appointed animal savior. “You’re the one with a rock!” replies Briggs, and the scene is a wonderful distillation of 2020s progressive mania. You’re making us unsafe! Speech is violence! Hey, man, you’re the one with the rock.

Tatum, who in 2017 starred in a hilarious Amazon Prime series, Comrade Detective, that did to Communism what Lulu does to Taliban fighters, gives off a strong sense that he’s turning right these days, at least culturally speaking. In a recent interview, he chafed at the suggestion that he was making a movie for middle America. (Also known as “America.”) “I would not call myself a liberal. I would not call myself a Republican or a Democrat. I’m not political,” Tatum told the Associated Press. “I do believe that the stereotypes and the generalizations can get us in trouble.”

“The news and political stuff, I think we’ve gotten to a place of real miscommunication and misunderstanding,” he added. “What does that even mean, to make movies for Middle America? I find it really strange even the concept of going, ‘We want to make a movie for these people.’”

The stereotypes he’s referring to are, I think, the ones dreamed up by condescending coastal liberals and their allies. Dog is a rebuke to them and to the way the culture in general treats some of our finest humans like animals to be put down.