‘Fixed’ Review – Netflix’s R-Rated Dog Comedy Has No New Tricks
Dogs have always been a movie-making cheat code, the easiest shortcut to making an audience laugh or cry – or both! – as necessary. The malleability of man’s best friend was presumably of interest to animation auteur Genndy Tartakovsky when he pitched Fixed, a depraved R-rated canine comedy, back in 2009. If it were released then, it might have seemed somewhat novel. Instead, releasing in 2025 on the very same day as the second season of Sausage Party: Foodtopia, which has taken animated orgies to the extremes of good taste and acceptability already, and it feels like Netflix has taken in a stray that it would have been more merciful to put down.
There are a few jokes in this movie, co-written and directed by Tartakovsky, in what feels like a fall from grace after his all-time great work on stuff like Samurai Jack, and Hotel Transylvania, but the one it’s most proud of is the idea of dogs having sex. It doesn’t matter what with, either. The opening scene finds the protagonist, Bull (Adam Devine, Captain Fall), humping the leg of the household nana, and this is, I kid you not, as funny and novel as the whole thing gets. The movie never rises above Bull’s knee-high vantage point, and thus its perspective never changes, repeatedly delivering the same played-out “dogs are horny too” gag.
In theory, I almost get it. The plot is kick-started by Bull discovering that his owners finally plan to neuter him, and in response, he decides to indulge in one final day of debauchery before he gets the snip. It’s a party comedy with dogs instead of people, and all the jokes live in the absurdity of giving cute doggo behaviour a depraved internal monologue. But it never evolves beyond that joke, displayed so capably – and at uncomfortable length – in the opening.
There’s no novelty in Tartakovsky’s quaint animation style anymore, even in the idiosyncratic feeling of Fixed looking like an adult film had a baby with Dexter’s Lab. There’s no novelty in talking animals or their complex internal politics and hierarchies – that has been done in loads of animated films, and Disney has done it with dogs specifically in Lady and the Tramp and its characterless live-action remake, among others. And there’s no novelty in raunchy adult animation, not in a post-South Park and Family Guy world, where even the loathsome Sausage Party is more boundary-pushing and provocative in purely orgiastic terms. There’s just nothing here of note.
The cast is surprisingly great, too. DeVine is joined by Idris Elba (Heads of State) as a boxer, Bobby Moynihan (The Second Best Hospital in the Galaxy) as a beagle, and Fred Armisen (Wednesday) as a dachshund, but the movie has little for them to do beyond dutifully follow Bull around while he tries to get his end away with anything other than an old relative’s leg. On that level, it’s a bit like a coming-of-age comedy – pun not intended but not altogether unwanted – without any of the charm the best ones have, because Bull isn’t easy to root for. He might have a ton of anxiety about his ability to perform with the leggy Afghan hound next door (Kathryn Hahn, The Studio), but he has also given his testicles their own personalities by which he defines himself almost entirely. The mileage simply isn’t there.
In this area, Fixed at least makes a go of things, and you can tell it’d quite like to be a more sentimental movie. But it turns out it’s hard to wedge sentiment into a ceaseless procession of bollock gags, and by the time it drags itself over the finish line, it’s hard to argue that Fixed wouldn’t have been better put out of its misery a long time ago.