Paw Patrol: The Mighty Movie is Shockingly Non-Terrible

I'm as surprised as you are!

There are at least two moments of comic self-awareness in Paw Patrol: The Mighty Movie, a sequel to the 2021 feature-film adaptation of the television cartoon for small children with abysmal taste. 

That’s roughly two more instances of comic self-awareness than I would expect from a mercenary endeavor like this. 

In the first, a woman who is being saved by the Paw Patrol explains to her pet goldfish of their unlikely saviors, “They’re cute little puppies that drive around in cars. I know that sounds weird but just go with it.” 

In the other, an excitable reporter voiced by Lil Rel Howery announces that the Paw Patrol have new powers and new outfits and new merch and then breaks the fourth wall to apologize to parents for the movie introducing so much crap that their children will want them to buy.

This is the film’s way of acknowledging that the world of Paw Patrol is deeply weird to the point of being surreal and borderline absurdist. 

Paw Patrol takes place in Adventure City, which bewilderingly leaves seemingly all of its most dangerous emergencies to cute little puppies that drive around in cars rather than have highly trained adult human firefighters or police officers handle them. 

The Paw Patrol don’t actually ride around in cars but rather in vehicles custom-designed for their specific specialties. Police dog Chase has a police truck. Skye (AKA The Girl) flies a helicopter. Rocky has a recycling truck while Rubble has a bulldozer and Zuma has a hovercraft. 

For extra pandering to the younglings at a certain point many of the pup’s vehicles began to transform into other, even cooler vehicles, almost as if they were Transformers or something. 

Paw Patrol couldn’t be more pandering or cynical in its undoubtedly correct conviction that if small children—and on television this is pitched to very small children—dig adorable little puppies, nifty vehicles and heroism then they’ll lose their fucking minds and positively shit themselves with delight over adorable little puppies who commandeer nifty vehicles in order to save the day. 

And if the kids love The Transformers then heck, why not make some of the pup’s vehicles Transformers as well. Finally, if superheroes are the biggest thing in pop culture and are particularly appealing to small kids then fuck it, the Paw Patrol are all superheroes now! 

That’s the context for the second moment of self-awareness; Paw Patrol exists to sell merchandise rather than to elucidate the human condition or help us understand ourselves and the complex world we live in. You can sell a fuck-ton of Paw Patrol merchandise by introducing thrilling new versions of popular characters that just so happen to embody the biggest trend in the past two decades of pop culture.

The nice thing about the Paw Patrol movies is that the television show set the bar so low that it’s damn near impossible not to soar over it. 

I did not see the first Paw Patrol movie because I did not have a Substack newsletter that forced me to see new movies of questionable quality when it came out but its sequel sets itself apart from the cartoon by having anything going for it. 

Paw Patrol is a brutal slog on television, a nightmarish gauntlet of mindless, lazy repetition, inane catchphrases recycled endlessly and interchangeable action sequence. It leaves feature film adaptations nowhere to go but up. 

In a premise that cross-breeds The Fantastic Four with Encanto, Paw Patrol: The Mighty Movie finds the titular very good boys and girls acquiring superpowers from a meteor Victoria "Vee" Vance (Taraji P. Henson) pulled to Adventure City using a giant magnet for her own nefarious purposes.

How does this magnet work? I’m a Juggalo, not a scientist and those motherfuckers be lying and getting me pissed. 

Skye is the first of the dogs to acquire strange powers that conveniently line up with their personas and areas of interest. Suddenly the pilot of the gang doesn’t need a helicopter in order to fly. 

The tiny yet potent pup is self-conscious about her size and her place within the high-tech pack. We’re even treated to a heart-wrenching flashback of Rider, the seemingly parent-less 10 year old human leader of the Paw Patrol, saving her after she chases after him in an attempt to escape the lonely, deadly fate of all unwanted dogs: being put down.

The other pup who actually has something to do this time around is Liberty, a longhaired dachshund introduced in Paw Patrol: The Movie. Like Mirabel Madrigal in Encanto she’s flummoxed to find herself the only member of her family without magical powers. 

So instead of saving the world Rider has her babysit the Junior Patrollers, a trio of adorable little puppies who dream of someday joining the Paw Patrol. 

It’s worth noting that the Paw Patrol are themselves small dogs but if children’s entertainment has taught us anything, it’s that even the smallest, cutest character can be trumped by a new character who is even smaller and even cuter.

For example in the pandering world of children’s entertainment, Baby Shark, of “Doo Doo Doo Doo” fame now regularly baby-sits Little Baby Shark, a cooing little lavender shark with a pacifier and diaper who alternates between cooing and crying. 

Finally, a Baby Shark who is not utterly old and repulsive!

Apparently people thought Baby Shark was old and disgusting and needed to be replaced. That was apparently the impetus for Little Baby Shark. 

Liberty tries to make the most of her borderline humiliating, disconcertingly gendered new gig as a glorified baby-sitter by training the dogs hardcore while trying to find her super-power.

Henson earns her paycheck and then some with an almost distressingly committed performance. She throws herself into the character’s outsized villainy with crazed abandon. 

The mad scientist looks like an Incel’s conception of a feminist; a dark-skinned woman with a shock of green hair, purple glasses, an eccentric wardrobe and an unforgivable disinterest in pleasing straight men or appealing to their tastes. 

She forms a super-villainous pack with Mayor Humdinger, the villain and most entertaining character from the television show. 

Mayor Humdinger looks and dresses like a pompous boob from a silent movie. He’s like the Monopoly Man but taller and more ridiculous. 

In one my favorite weird gags, Humdinger meets Vee in what appears to be one of those coed prisons that house men and women in the same cell. Humdinger is wearing the exact same outfit that he wears in every episode of Paw Patrol except that it’s prison orange instead of his usual purple. 

Later Mayor Humdinger uses the meteor’s freaky powers to become a towering giant. A Mayor Humdinger Kaiju is an idea I can get behind. 

Zee and Mayor Humdinger are out to steal the meteor and harness its awesome power in order to take over Adventure City and then the world. 

All that stands in their way is a pathologically mature Rider, who should be in foster care or at least in school but instead has devoted his life to being Nick Fury to the Paw Patrol’s furry Avengers. 

In addition to the two moments of self-awareness mentioned above Paw Patrol: The Mighty Movie has two borderline clever gags, which is, again, two more than I expected. 

In one, a single member of Mayor Humdinger’s posse of cat sidekicks briefly acquires the ability to talk and speaks a single sentence as special guest voiceover artist Chris Rock and then never speaks again. 

Hiring a big star with a distinctive voice like Rock for a single sentence of dialogue is a neat gag, as is having the Junior Patrollers distract Vee by pretending to sell whatever their equivalent of Girl Scout cookies might be and when she gushes about a chocolate variety, having one say that they personally can’t eat chocolate but more power to her if that’s her preference. 

Paw Patrol: Mighty Movie is a zeitgeist-chasing act of purposeful pandering and cynical manipulation that pays off because even a big, shiny, silly, spectacle-rich superhero mediocrity is infinitely superior to Paw Patrol as a deathless television institution that really should be put down. 

I am not saying that anyone over the age of ten should see this but if you find yourself watching it alongside your child, or while unbelievably stoned, you might find yourself thinking things you never thought you’d think about a Paw Patrol cinematic sequel, like, “Huh, this actually isn’t that bad” and “this is somewhat better than I expected.” 

Two and a Half Stars out of Five