Benji – *

Benji  (Brandon Camp, 2018)

Global Acquisition

 

If you grew up in the 1970s or 1980s you now awake nearly every day to hear that some film or television show is being remade or “rebooted”. For some this is good news as beloved films find new life and you have an excuse to rewatch the original versions. For others, this provokes outrage at the thought of classic films being ruined by remaking. In yet other cases it seems like the horrors of the past are being reanimated by some mysterious force intent on destroying humanity, as if someone was thawing out cryogenically frozen tyrants and other monsters from history.

This latter scenario best describes how I felt about the relaunch of Benji, movies I hated as a kid and am now watching again in new versions thanks to Netflix, sort of. This reboot did nothing to convince me that I was wrong about the originals or in my fears that new versions would be terrible too. The new film has the iconic dog going from an unloved stray directly into the hearts of two kids and their mom as he tries to rescue the kids from a couple of armed robbers who have taken them hostage after the kids walked in on a robbery.

The problems here are multiple. This film looks cheap (even making mistakes when it comes to basic continuity editing) and features some of the worst acting to be found on Netflix or anywhere else for that matter. As bad as the kids are – this will not rival The Florida Project for amazing work with nonprofessional child actors – many of the adults are even worse. The dog that plays the eponymous character is one of two cast members that turns in a credible performance, the other being veteran horror actor Angus Sampson, who plays one of the baddies.  But then the screenplay, which is beyond insipid and formulaic, doesn’t really give the cast much to work with. In these ways, the film closely resembles some of the poorly reviewed faith-based films that have been being released lately. This resemblance is likely not a coincidence given the numerous prayer scenes in the film and writer-director Brandon Camp’s outspoken Christian beliefs. In fact, I wonder why Netflix didn’t embrace this aspect of the movie in its promotion of the film, such as it was. After all, they want to appeal to all audiences, so why not the faith-based crowd?

There is no doubt for me that most adults will be bored stiff watching this, but kids are harder to predict. Mine enjoyed the film, but would lose interest whenever Benji wasn’t on screen. They did then ask me to watch it again, as kids do, and this led to me inventing all sorts of reasons that we couldn’t (oh for the days of Blockbuster: “I took it back to the video store kids”!). In any event, children’s entertainment is an important genre for Netflix as parents the world over need on-demand entertainment solutions, but this is also one of the most competitive areas in the world film and television industries. Hollywood is winning this battle while Netflix has largely floundered looking for original series and movies for the under-10 crowd. With Disney taking its content off the service from 2019, the streamer will need to get going on this front and Benji does not seem like a promising start, and neither do some of its other family films such as Sahara.

Because of Hollywood’s dominance in the family market, it is difficult for competing studios to find great kids’ projects and to pull them off well. There is simply too much money to be made at theaters and through DVD sales to see this kind of film move to SVOD exclusively. Instead, the SVOD services have mainly licensed this kind of content (i.e. rented it from other studios) or picked up what the studios have overlooked. Such is the case with Benji. Having been produced by Blumouse – a production company that has a first-look distribution deal with Universal as well as its own distribution label (BH Tilt) – we can safely say that this film was offered to theatrical distributors first before being offered to Netflix. If this is indeed the case, then sometimes there is still some genius in the system if it kept normative distributors away from this film.

 

Netflix Tendencies

Studio Leftovers: Passed over by Universal and, likely BH Tilt before landing at Netflix.

 

Conspicuous Product Placement: New Orleans is given quite the tourist treatment in this movie, as it includes a number of the city’s storied eccentric characters throughout.