Ah, the trouble with having to make a movie last 90 minutes.
At its core, "Oddball" is a wonderful story. Swampy Marsh (marvellously played by Shane Jacobson), is a widowed chicken farmer with a lovable but trouble-prone dog (Oddball); while his conservationist daughter is struggling with a penguin colony being decimated by foxes. Marsh has an inspiration - get Oddball to guard penguins from foxes, in the same way his other dogs guard his chickens. It works brilliantly, and along the way he bonds with his granddaughter and daughter.
Unfortunately, this story would struggle to stretch to an hour. So the movie is padded out with a rather formulaic sub-plot about a rival business having a vested interest in the penguin colony's demise. This sub-plot also resolves rather strangely and abruptly.
Yes I recommend this movie, for the performance of Jacobsen, some very touching family scenes between the three main characters, and the delightful dog and penguins. But I wish the sub-plot wasn't there, or at least was handled differently.
At its core, "Oddball" is a wonderful story. Swampy Marsh (marvellously played by Shane Jacobson), is a widowed chicken farmer with a lovable but trouble-prone dog (Oddball); while his conservationist daughter is struggling with a penguin colony being decimated by foxes. Marsh has an inspiration - get Oddball to guard penguins from foxes, in the same way his other dogs guard his chickens. It works brilliantly, and along the way he bonds with his granddaughter and daughter.
Unfortunately, this story would struggle to stretch to an hour. So the movie is padded out with a rather formulaic sub-plot about a rival business having a vested interest in the penguin colony's demise. This sub-plot also resolves rather strangely and abruptly.
Yes I recommend this movie, for the performance of Jacobsen, some very touching family scenes between the three main characters, and the delightful dog and penguins. But I wish the sub-plot wasn't there, or at least was handled differently.