Netflix opened its 2024 Christmas season on November 4th — leaves still on trees, much of the country in T-shirts — with A Dog's Perfect Christmas, based on a W. Bruce Cameron story, directed by Cathryn Michon, and starring a basset hound named Winstead as the film's moral center. This is not a complaint about the dog. The cast is a minor tragedy of miscasting. Dennis Quaid plays Sander Goss, a constipated-looking grieving widower; Milo Ventimiglia plays Hunter, a workaholic father too busy impressing his mercurial new boss (Michon, pulling double duty) to help his wife around the house; Kathleen Rose Perkins plays Juliana, the harried housewife and self-described 'Patrick Mahomes of Christmas,' who eventually contracts an infection threatening sepsis. The family's response to the sepsis development is roughly equivalent to mild concern about a parking ticket. Winstead the basset hound is voiced by Thomas Haden Church as a well-meaning dunce for whom everything is either 'very good' or 'very bad.' 'Merry Christmas' is, categorically, very good. The film's exposition is delivered with the blunt efficiency of a legal deposition — Perkins at one point tells her daughter that Sander 'spent all of his money on medical treatments and now he was forced to move in here,' a sentence no human being has ever spoken aloud. There are genuine pockets. Mary Steenburgen's Claire, a widowed townswoman who arrives in every scene like a sip of eggnog — substantial and a little spicy — is the film's only real personality. Brooke Lena Johnson's Ello gets a couple of ice-dancing scenes with hockey love interest Sean (Ethan Loomis) that are, against all odds, enjoyable. Ariana Grande's 'Santa Tell Me' needle-drop is infinitely listenable. The British Columbia locations do not immediately scan as Canada, which is a genuine achievement of this genre. What the film lacks is not competence but stakes, texture, or any reason to put down your phone — except briefly, when the sepsis storyline takes a dramatic turn that almost veers toward genuine tension before retreating into the safety of its Netflix Christmas contract. The 'OK boomer' line lands with the force of a crumpled receipt. The twins are toddlers. The film's most emotionally honest moment is a Joni Mitchell cover playing while the family decorates for a hospitalized mother. The bar in this genre is not high. Hot Frosty was ludicrous. The Lindsay Lohan vehicles are at least self-knowing. Champagne Problems went to France. A Dog's Perfect Christmas does not clear any of these bars — it grazes the bottom of the frame on its way past. It will, the review notes correctly, do numbers as a second-screen experience, which is precisely what it was designed for and precisely what it deserves.
