The 1989 Inter-Species Mismatched Buddy Comedy K-9 Is No Turner & Hooch. It's Better, or Worse, I Can't Remember

If you only see one movie in your life this shouldn't be it.

When I was a film critic for The A.V. Club and The Dissolve, I only had one criterion for every movie that I reviewed: is it better than Citizen Kane? Looking back, that was perhaps a misguided and wrong-headed approach to criticism in that literally no movie I wrote about during that time topped Orson Welles and Herman “Mank” Mankiewicz’s towering masterpiece. 

Only one movie has exceeded Citizen Kane in quality. That movie, appropriately enough, is Mank, which was about the actual making of Citizen Kane, where Mankiewicz did everything and Orson Welles mostly napped when not onscreen. 

I now see the error of my ways. In the future, I will no longer compare every movie to Citizen Kane. Instead, I will rank every film based on how “Woke” it is. 

I’m beginning this new, exciting phase of my career in the most obvious possible place: the critically maligned but commercially successful 1989 interspecies mismatched buddy cop comedy K-9. 

I derive no joy in telling you that K-9 is not “Woke.” For starters, its heroes are both pigs, which is what I and the rest of my online extremists like to call the cops. We also have this cool saying: ACAB. It’s a very nuanced concept that means that All Cops Are Bad. K-9 instead posits ACCIAGB for A Canine Cop Is a Good Boy, or ACCIAGBOYHIOYHI for A Canine Cop Is a Good Boy,  Oh Yes He Is, Oh Yes He Is! 

A series of dogs played the co-headlining role of Jerry Lee, an ultra-violent police dog who proves that you don’t need to be human to participate in police brutality enthusiastically. 

Jerry Lee got his name because, like Jerry Lee Lewis, he is a killer, in the sense that he’s probably bit a few people of color so hard that they bled out and died. That makes him not only an effective officer in the eyes of his bosses but a hero as well. In a tough bar full of non-white hoodlums, Jerry Lee terrorizes the crowd and then threatens to bite off a criminal’s penis if he doesn’t play ball with his partner Detective Michael Dooley (James Belushi). 

K-9 offers a real bait and switch. Family audiences were lured in by an ad campaign that promised an adorable comedy about a funny cop buddying up with a cute dog. Instead, they got a grim, raunchy, and violent action movie that makes no effort to appeal to the kiddies. 

On the contrary, K-9 is inappropriately adult without being remotely grown-up or mature. It’s the kind of raunchy romp where the human half of the mismatched buddy cop duo stops the action so that he can make sure that Jerry Lee has sex with a fancy female dog to completion.

Earlier, Officer Dooley is worried that he himself will not be able to have sex with his girlfriend, maintain an erection, and ejaculate if Jerry Lee watches him have sex, silently critiquing and judging him with every glance. Thankfully, he is able to perform adequately in the sack despite the unwanted attention.  

K-9 is like every other mismatched buddy cop movie in existence. James Belushi stars as a tough cop who plays by his own rules but gets results. His captain disapproves of his hot-headed ways and unconventional tactics, but our hero doesn’t care. 

He’s obsessed with bringing down  Ken Lyman (Kevin Tighe), a drug lord who hides his criminal activity behind the wholesome facade of a wealthy philanthropist and businessman. 

Officer Dooley doesn’t care how many criminals he has to harass and brutalize to keep Tighe’s villain from pulling off a fifty-million-dollar drug deal. 

The boorish hero needs a dog to help him sniff out the drugs. He gets one with an attitude even worse than his own in the form of Jerry Lee. 

At first, Officer Dooley and Jerry Lee do NOT get along. Jerry Lee is too aggressive and then too docile, but he begins to win over his partner when he goes nuts in a sleazy dive and nearly bites a man’s dong off. 

Mutual antagonism between the outlaw cop and the German Shepard with attitude eventually leads to friendship and even love as they bond while hunting down the bad guy. 

Belushi isn’t anywhere near charming or appealing enough to pull off the flagrant jackassery that defines his character. In an early comic set-piece, he handcuffs a terrified informant to the side of his car and then starts driving. 

The man is scared of dying a horrible death by being run over or colliding with a wall, so he gives up the information Officer Dooley wants. Police brutality is Officer Dooley’s whole philosophy as a law enforcement officer. He is of the mindset that if people don’t want to be brutalized by the police, they need to never be in a position where that might happen. 

Some of Dooley’s tactics are more problematic than others. For example, while evading the bad guys, Office Dooley leaps on an attractive blonde stranger in a bikini on the beach and begins passionately making out with her. 

He tries to explain that maybe what he did has something to do with his job and police work or something, but he gets an enraged knee to the groin all the same.

K-9 bored me to the point that I was able to focus on pointless trivia, like the fact that both of the actors from the seminal Tales From the Crypt episode “Cutting Cards” are in the film. William Sadler is cast wildly against type as a yuppie car salesman, while Tighe is, of course, the generic lead villain. 

This time waster was everything I expected it would be and much less. Yet it wasn’t just a hit and the thirtieth top-grossing film of 1989: it was the beginning of a franchise that includes a failed science fiction pilot co-written by Steven E. DeSouza, the legendary screenwriter of Commando, Die Hard and 48 Hours, and a pair of direct-to-video movies: K-911 (which confusingly posits that James Belushi's cop character from K-9 and his canine sidekick Jerry Lee were somehow behind the 9/11 terrorist attacks) and 2002’s K-9: P.I.

K-9 has no real reason to exist in a world with Turner & Hooch, which is the exact same but maybe better and maybe worse, yet it led to a full-on trilogy.  

This stinker fails to provide the “Woke” progressiveness I angrily demand from stupid movies from decades ago, but it also fails on a comic and action level. 

K-9 is a real dog in more ways than one.