Anupama Chopra reviews Ohh My Dog, written, directed and produced by Amit Rai, a schmaltzy but well-meaning melodrama built on the idea that dogs aren't just man's best friends but saviours with semi-celestial powers. Anupama places it in a long Hindi film lineage, from Tuffy in Hum Aapke Hain Koun..! delivering a letter and necklace in time, to Moti the Labrador avenging his dead owner in the 1985 Jackie Shroff starrer Teri Meherbaniyan, to the more recent Kannada film 777 Charlie, in which a Labrador becomes the emotional anchor of Rakshit Shetty's lonely, self-destructive factory worker. The film intercuts two parallel stories, one in Patna where a dog is searching for its human and one in Assam where a human is searching for his dog, linked because the dogs are siblings separated as puppies, born to a heralded police dog named Senapati. Amit Rai gives the meatiest part to his son Maahi Rai, who plays a genius kid named Apu in a nod to Satyajit Ray's trilogy, with Pankaj Tripathi as a wise local teacher and Pawan Malhotra also in the cast, though Anupama's point is that the real heroes here are the dogs, especially Oscar, a beautiful Indie with a crooked front leg and wise eyes.
Anupama finds the story meanders over two and a half hours and repeatedly crosses the line into corny, with Amit Rai flinching from neither implausibility nor high emotion and sprinkling a generous dose of divinity over the screenplay, so that when a character says ab iss kutte ko Bhagwan bhi nahin bacha sakte you already know the heavens will do exactly that. She notes the film is built on chases, dogs chasing humans, humans chasing humans and humans chasing dogs, across state highways and cities and into buildings, homes and hospitals, which turns visually and thematically repetitive, and that the humans are written as familiar types, slimy corrupt cops, a hapless wailing mother, a wise local teacher, who inevitably get sidelined the moment they come up against the charismatic Oscar. Pankaj Tripathi does what he can with a meagre role, while Maahi Rai is a natural who brings a determined innocence to the story, and Anupama takes real pleasure in a film largely shot on location, with actual messy crowded streets and homes instead of synthetic green screen perfection. Oscar remains the star of the show, positioned as a canine superhero, and you will roll your eyes but it works. The title plays on Amit Rai's previous film Oh My God 2. Ohh My Dog is more obviously calculated and preachy, but Amit Rai has a talent for old fashioned sentimentality, and that is the THR bottom line. Ohh My Dog is playing in theatres near you.
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