AJ GOES TO THE DOG PARK - Mark Reviews Movies

AJ Goes to the Dog Park, Doppelgänger Releasing

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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 24, 2025

It's not that AJ Goes to the Dog Park looks cheap, is unconvincingly performed by its actors, and only exists as an excuse to make as many jokes as possible. All of those elements are kind of the point of this movie from writer/director Toby Jones (not to be confused with the English character actor). They are also, however, unavoidable facts about the quality and execution of the movie.

There's some charm to this way of making a movie, to be sure—especially one that doesn't take itself seriously in any way. Our eponymous hero, for example, has a pair of little dogs, the ones he brings to a local dog park in Fargo as part of his mundane but happy routine. At times, they are real pups. At others, they're stuffed animals that look nothing like their real counterparts, and occasionally, one of the dogs is fake, while the other is real. There's no rhyme or reason as to when or why the dogs shift between props and the real deal, and that inconsistency, perhaps, is the joke, along with how unconvincing the lack of any effort in this kind of illusion is.

It's a fool's errand, obviously, to attempt to force strict rules upon comedy, but if there is one loose rule that should apply to humor, it's that a joke should probably exist as a joke. There are some good ones in Jones' movie, which are unfortunately undermined by the limitations of its production more often than not, but there are also a good number of one that exist here like those fake dogs. If there is an actual joke to those beyond the idea that it looks cheap and absurd, it might only exist in the filmmaker's mind.

Even though the movie is mostly a machine for assorted gags, there is a plot to it—maybe way too much of one, actually. It revolves around AJ (AJ Thompson), a boringly ordinary Midwestern guy who works an entry-level job at a tech company owned by his father (played by Greg Carlson), has no desire for professional growth, spends his off-hours with a pair of friends or his dogs, and falls asleep on the couch watching videos on a particular app. It's not much of a life, but it keeps AJ's heart rate low and makes him happy.

One day, AJ discovers that the dog park where he takes his pooches has been transformed into a "blog park" by the mayor (played by Crystal Cossette Knight). After his friends announce they're moving and his TV no longer supports his go-to video platform, our man makes it his mission to convince the mayor to shut down such an out-of-date project and re-open the dog park. If every other part of his happiness is going to go away, AJ is determined to ensure that at least that one thing remains a constant.

In practice, this means AJ must complete a series of tasks to outshine and/or defeat the mayor, who got her job by accomplishing a handful of extraordinary deeds. One was defeating a famous fighter, renowned for using his elbows in combat, so AJ enlists the help of Thomas (Jason Ehlert), who has a tragic back story that he'll only reveal at a very specific time of the day. We get a training montage of AJ strengthening and learning to fight with only his elbows, and the punch line, in which it's revealed that our protagonist has made more effort making it seem as if time is passing, is theoretically funny. There's a distinction between dead-pan delivery and actors simply reciting their lines without much enthusiasm, and a lot of the attempted humor here suffers because most of the cast doesn't seem to recognize that.

Another challenge has AJ trying to catch the biggest fish in a local lake, so he gets help from Captain Seastab, played by Jacob Hartje with a level of dedication—not to mention a pirate accent—that stands in stark contrast to the rest of the cast. The captain has a tragic background, too, that isn't played for laughs, because Jones actually does want to offer some kind of lesson about how people can become so obsessed with a particular part of their lives that they miss out on what makes life worthwhile. It's difficult to accept the sincerity of that message when it's forced into the middle of so many jokes and serves as an epilogue that's interrupted by an out-of-left-field climax involving a giant monster.

To watch the movie is to want to laugh along with it, because it is so good-natured, well-meaning, and made with an awareness that its restrictions can be part of the fun. Every joke of AJ Goes to the Dog Park, though, is too random to really work, too forced into the overwhelming plotting to feel natural, or too amateurishly told or performed for the setup or punch line to stick. We get the idea of what the movie is trying to do, but it just doesn't pull off that trick.

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