A Doggone Christmas (2016)

A Doggone Christmas opens with the CIA running experiments on a Jack Russell Terrier named Murphy who has developed telepathic abilities. The government, naturally, wants to weaponize him. Murphy escapes into the suburbs, lands with two brothers named Jamie and Tyler, and the rest of the film is a chase movie dressed up in tinsel. The whole thing runs 82 minutes, costs whatever it costs to rent a helicopter for an afternoon, and has a 4.2 on IMDb. It knows exactly what it is.

Is A Doggone Christmas Worth Watching?

The honest answer depends heavily on who is watching with you. For adults sitting alone, no. For adults sitting next to a child under ten who loves dogs, possibly yes. The film does not pretend to be anything other than low-budget family entertainment built around a genuinely talented animal, and on that narrow set of terms it delivers.

Murphy is played by Just Jesse the Jack, a Jack Russell Terrier who became an internet phenomenon through the "Useful Dog Tricks" video series on YouTube. The videos, made with trainer Heather Brook, accumulated tens of millions of views and landed Jesse on The Rachael Ray Show and The Late Show with David Letterman. The dog can make coffee, vacuum, strip a bed, and pack a suitcase. Putting him in a feature film was an obvious next step. This is his feature debut.

Whether Jesse "acts" in any meaningful sense is a philosophical question. He runs on cue, sits on cue, and stares intently at things on cue. The telepathic communication is conveyed through voice-over and reaction shots rather than anything the dog actually does. But Jesse has presence, which is more than can be said for several of the human cast members.

The Director: 150 Films and Counting

Jim Wynorski directed this film. That fact requires at least a paragraph. Wynorski apprenticed under Roger Corman in the early 1980s after moving to California and essentially knocking on Corman's door. He absorbed Corman's philosophy of fast, cheap, and commercially viable, then spent the next four decades applying it to an astonishing range of genres. By the time A Doggone Christmas came out in November 2016, Wynorski had directed well over 100 feature films, including The Return of Swamp Thing, Munchie (which was Jennifer Love Hewitt's film debut in 1992), and a long string of Syfy Channel creature features.

Wynorski making a family Christmas dog movie is not as strange as it sounds. He has always followed the work wherever it goes. What he brings is efficiency: A Doggone Christmas does not waste time, the edits are clean, and the chase sequences are functional even when the green screen work is not. This is a man who knows how to finish a film on schedule.

The Human Cast: A Doggone Christmas Review of the Acting

Dominique Swain plays Dr. Langley, the government scientist associated with Murphy's development. Swain was chosen out of 2,500 girls to play the title role in Adrian Lyne's controversial 1997 Lolita adaptation when she was fifteen. That film was released in Europe but never found a US distributor. It earned her critical attention and then, by her own account, typecast her. Two decades later she is playing the government scientist in a low-budget telepathic dog movie. The arc is not triumphant, but she is a professional and she plays the role straight, which is the correct choice.

Rib Hillis plays Bob Gernsback, the father who has lost his job as a toy designer and is anxious about giving his sons a proper Christmas. This is the film's one genuinely functional dramatic idea. A family under financial stress at Christmas, a stray dog that brings joy, and a government threat that forces the community to pull together. It is not an original premise, but it is a real one. Hillis carries it adequately.

The two brothers, Jamie and Tyler, are played by Walker Mintz and Jaret Sacrey. They are earnest and likeable. The film does not ask much of them beyond running away from men in black SUVs and talking to their dog.

What Actually Works

The film is at its best during the sequences that let Jesse demonstrate his real skills. There are moments where Murphy solves a problem using something the dog can actually do rather than something accomplished in post-production, and those scenes have a different texture. You are watching a genuinely trained animal doing a genuinely difficult thing, and that registers.

The Christmas backdrop works too, in a modest way. The family's anxiety about the holiday grounds what could have been a purely mechanical chase plot. The stakes are not saving the world but saving Christmas for two specific boys, and that is a more manageable, more human goal.

Paul Logan plays Cutler, the villain pursuing Murphy, and he commits fully to being menacing about a dog. That commitment is its own form of craft.

What Does Not Work

The telepathic conceit is underdeveloped. The film establishes early that Murphy can communicate with the brothers and then does surprisingly little with the premise beyond using it as a plot convenience. If a dog can send you telepathic messages, the implications for the family, for the boys' friendships, for how they handle school, for everything, should be enormous. The screenplay (written by Josh Holt, J. Brad Wilke, and Wynorski) treats the telepathy as a delivery mechanism for exposition rather than as something genuinely strange to explore.

The government threat never feels credible. Helicopters and drones descend on a suburban neighborhood in the week before Christmas, and the local community does not seem particularly alarmed. The scale of the federal response to one small dog is meant to be comedic, but the film never quite commits to playing it as satire. It sits between genres without fully occupying either.

The green screen work is bad in the way low-budget green screen work often is. The explosions are CGI. The film knows this is not a weakness it can fix, so it moves quickly past these moments.

A Doggone Christmas spawned two sequels: A Doggone Hollywood in 2017 and A Doggone Adventure in 2018. Jesse the Jack Russell Terrier starred in all three. The franchise exists because the first film made money despite everything, which tells you something about the reliable appeal of dogs in Christmas movies.