Review for Marmaduke

The plot of Marmaduke is simple. His owner Phil (Lee Pace) is offered a job in California and relocates the entire family to Orange County to work for William H Macy's organic pet food company. Here Marmaduke finds that in the Dog Park there is an established order of pedigrees headed by Bosco (Voiced by Kiefer Sutherland) and the mutts headed by Mazie (Voiced by Emma Stone). Typically, Marmaduke is unaware that Mazie likes him, mainly because he has fallen for the charms of Jezebel (Voiced by Fergie from The Black Eyed Peas). He plans of increasing his status in the park to be accepted and get the girl. This is where things start going wrong in a madcap thrill ride of dog surfing and more.
Marmaduke is a film that almost succeeds in making the Garfield adaptation look like a masterpiece. It seems that Hollywood think they can take a classic cartoon, get a big named star to voice them (in this case Owen Wilson) and the story will just write itself. That's the problem. I was never a fan of the original comic, but from what I've seen, the general idea is that Marmaduke is a big dog who keeps getting yelled at for doing things he shouldn't. It's classic three pane comic stuff. The problem is extending that to a feature film. Whereas at least with Garfield they had managed (with some success) to translate the comic into a half hour cartoon show, it was shown that feature length, comics don't work and never have.
That being said, the film is fine for what it is. It doesn't take itself too seriously and Wilson as the Marmaduke and Sutherland as Bosco are great in their voice performances. The acting by the real people is awful and even Macy looks like he has no idea what he is doing there. Animals are a mixture of real and CGI and it actually works fine... that is until the end when it seems like the guys in the CGI department decided to freak out and include a large scene that not only looks ridiculous and doesn't work, but also could not look any faker. When I look at the decent CGI of the mouths throughout the film I was shocked at the horrendous work being done in this one scene.
Included on the DVD are three deleted scenes which are a little redundant and two featurettes on the casting and dog surfing scenes. Considering the film is based on a much loved comic I am surprised that there was not a more indepth look into how the project came to be. Though it would probably be 'A studio exec bought the rights and said make a film. BAM! Done!' Though more is included on the Blu-ray, it is a shame that those who bought the DVD did not get these additional extras as it cannot be for space reasons. A digital copy of the film is also available which if you have children and want to keep them quiet for a car journey... you could surely find them something better than this!.
Marmaduke is, as I say, so bad that it makes Garfield look like a masterpiece. Sure, it is not horrendous like say Batman and Robin or anything and there are some parts that are fun, but all in all it was just a waste of an opportunity. Hopefully someone in Hollywood is not reading Farside or Peanuts right now!