She lives with her mother and siblings side by side with a nursing cat and her kittens. As it opens, young Bella is enjoying an idyllic puppyhood, or at least as idyllic as a puppyhood spent beneath the ruins of a collapsed building can be. (Spoilers follow.)īella is separated from her animal family as a puppy: 4Ī Dog’s Way Home doesn’t wait long to get to the rough stuff.

Below, we’ve rated some key scenes in the film on a scale of 1 to 5, 1 being the equivalent of a YouTube clip of a sleeping puppy and 5 being that scene in Milo and Otis where the kitten gets attacked by seagulls. Or at least, it will be to viewers who can’t stand to see sweet little dogs get in any sort of trouble.

On one level, the Charles Martin Smith–directed film, in which the lovable Bella has to journey over 400 miles to be reunited with her owner, is perfectly fine, a piece of warmhearted family fare filled with positive messages about caring for veterans, a subplot about the unfairness of bans on pit bulls, and a no-big-deal depiction of a loving same-sex relationship. For such folks, and I count myself among them, the new A Dog’s Way Home might as well be a Saw sequel.Ī companion piece to last year’s A Dog’s Purpose - whose premise of following a dog through many incarnations required one dog death scene after another - A Dog’s Way Home inspires a kind of cognitive dissonance. The climactic scenes of Old Yeller or Turner & Hooch? Never again.

The Human Centipede? Audition? Hostel? Whatever. Or at least it is to viewers of a certain temperament, those for whom any scene of an animal in peril or distress is torture.

When he kills a woman instead, letting the kitten go free, it’s a relief. We’ve seen Bateman commit one unspeakable act after another yet this is the most upsetting moment. Near the end of Mary Harron’s 2000 film American Psycho, as Patrick Bateman’s insanity reaches fevered heights, the (maybe) serial killer picks up a kitten and appears to be on the verge of shooting it at the insistence of an ATM’s instruction screen. **ALL IMAGES ARE PROPERTY OF SONY PICTURES ENTERTAINMENT INC.

A dogs purpose torture