You would think that, by now, people would have stopped making films about talking animals. You would think that, after witnessing the monstrosities that were Andy the Talking Hedgehog, A Talking Cat!?! and Kevin Spacey’s Nine Lives, producers would run a giddy mile from such a flat-out dismal genre.
And yet.
Not only is there a new contender in town, but it might be the most inexplicable of them all. The film in question is Best Friend from Heaven and ... look, perhaps it’s better if we go through its trailer scene by scene.
1 Meet Gabe. He’s an adorable dog with a kind face. Better yet, his wonderful owner is about to get married. Honestly, it just feels as if nothing could ever possibly go wrong. Oh, no, wait. This film is called Best Friend from Heaven, isn’t it? Right, scrap all that. Someone is about to die.
2 Fortunately, it’s Gabe. We don’t see Gabe being hit by a car as he chases a squirrel into the middle of a busy road, but the look of abject horror on his owner’s face – combined with a sound effect so startlingly graphic that it’s bound to stop your children from sleeping for several weeks – suggests that this is what has happened. Really, it’s for the best. Would you want to see a film about a dog pining away to nothing because his owner was killed and his heart is broken? No, of course you wouldn’t. It’s much better if the dog dies.
3 Remember, though, this film is called Best Friend from Heaven, so Gabe doesn’t die. Instead, he becomes an angel, complete with glassy, taxidermy-style eyes, a mouth that opens and shuts as though it has been hooked up to a wire and a grizzled, old human voice that gives him the ability to communicate in a bored, distracted way, almost like the things he says are being read absent-mindedly from a sheet of paper for the first time without any kind of rehearsal. Anyway, Gabe, unhappy with his new life in heaven, escapes the vengeful clutches of the lord God and returns to Earth.
4 There, he discovers something truly terrible. His owner has been so bludgeoned by grief – and, hopefully, guilt at not keeping Gabe in a more secure environment – that she has called off the wedding. He tries to intervene, but he is invisible to them. As they hug, he pulls a face that makes it look a bit like he’s doing a ghost-dump on their lawn and remembers the message of Quantum Leap. If he can put things right and make his owner get married, perhaps he will come back to life.
5 Oh, incidentally, Gabe’s distracted old-man voice is performed by Kris Kristofferson. Who knows why. It may be that he hopes to use this film as a way to start marketing his music to children. It may be that he really likes crudely exploitative films with undefined spiritual messages. Perhaps he wants to make sure that people don’t talk about only Heaven’s Gate when he dies. Either way, here’s Kristofferson being a dog. Ta-dah.
6 Anyway, long story short, Gabe rounds up a team of local kooks, who organise a ramshackle wedding behind his grieving owner’s back and force through the marriage by some feat of cruel manipulation, which seems to give away the entire plot of the film. At least everyone is happy. And Gabe? Well, the final shot of the trailer is Gabe running back to heaven, so it seems he didn’t get his wish to came back to life. Yes, that’s the one thing you should take from Best Friend from Heaven, kids: death is for ever and you can’t escape its icy tendrils, no matter how hard you plead with God.
