HOW TO KILL YOUR NEIGHBOR’S DOG
A wordy wisp of a comedy.
Running time: 107 minutes. Rated R (for language). At Village East Cinemas, Murray Hill Cinemas.
SHAKESPEAREAN actor Kenneth Branagh doffs tights and pulls on his cranky pants to play a curmudgeonly writer in this wordy wisp of a comedy.
And writer-director Michael Kalesniko is lucky he did.
Without the actor’s pitch-perfect comedic skills the entire movie could have been crushed under the avalanche of quips and wisecracks tumbling from Kalesniko’s too-clever-by-half pen.
As it is, “Neighbor’s Dog” emerges relatively unscathed as an occasionally amusing diversion.
Branagh plays Peter McGowan, a famous Los Angeles playwright with a laundry list of gripes: insomnia, impotence, and that thematic staple, writer’s block.
He has to cope with the added irritant of his neighbor’s straggly mutt, whose incessant barking is almost drowned out by the loud ticking of his wife’s biological clock.
Oh, and he has a stalker.
Kalesniko seems to have crammed every witticism that has ever occurred to him into this one movie, which premiered on cable TV last year.
The plot line struggling for air beneath all the wordiness centers on Amy (talented newcomer Suzi Hofrichter), the 9-year-old girl who moves in next door with her mother.
Peter’s wife, Melanie (the delightful Robin Wright Penn) hopes to reverse her husband’s strong anti-children stance by inviting the child over.
(There’s a nice setup in which Branagh awkwardly joins Amy, her dolls and a stuffed giraffe for a make-believe tea party, squeezing himself into a Lilliputian table-and-chair set and asking, “Now, how do we play this scene?”)
Of course, the man critics call “America’s favorite bastard” softens and, as he does, the movie loses much of its punch.