Camden Movies: Marley and Me | Owen Wilson | Jennifer Aniston

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The Review - AT THE MOVIES with DAN CARRIER
Published: 12 March 2009

Jennifer Aniston and Owen Wilson prepare to welcome a golden retriever into their lives

Couple have a great life: this really isn’t big news

MARLEY AND ME
Directed by David Frankel
Certificate 12a

MARLEY is a cute doggy who wags his tail in all the right places, but whose thespian abilities are not enough to save this film starring Owen Wilson and Jennifer Aniston from being a tepid bundle of inoffensive jokes and a tippy-toed plot.
It tells the story of an annoyingly lovely couple called the Grogans, who have a rather nice life, being young and in love. But Mrs Grogan believes everything must be planned down to a tee, and her other half is a trifle worried this means he is just a segment that fits in with her life-plan.
Step one is meet him, step two is marry him, while step three is procreation.
And he gets a touch of the collywobbles about fatherhood. So when a colleague suggests they get a dog instead to ward of the patter of unshod human feet, he decides it’s a jolly good idea.
What happens next is pretty obvious, and that is the film’s major stalling point.
The cute golden retriever gets into the odd, easily solveable mishap, bounces about them gamely and then persuades them that if they can handle a cute doggy, then perhaps kiddies are not the horror Mr Grogan believes them to be.
It’s all very smooth, sugary sweet and ultimately little more than a celebration of a nauseating, have-it-all heterosexual couple working towards producing their regulation two-point-four children.

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