Ohh My Dog movie review: Pankaj Tripathi, stray dogs are stars of rare kid-friendly film

In a parallel track, somewhere in Bihar, a young man who works on a construction site has gone missing. The dog he’d adopted is the one who goes looking, gathering up a bunch of people for the quest, chief among them being Pankaj Tripathi as the teacher who provides basic education to these boys, living far away from their families. There’s also a cop (Rajesh Kumar) here as well, but he’s lax about his duties, and couldn’t be bothered by either missing humans, or animals.

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When the film stays with the furry four-legged creatures, it is eminently watchable. What makes these dogs different are that they are your non-pedigreed dogs—our hero Oscar looks like a brindle, with a game paw, and a jaunty red kerchief which never miraculously gets lost through the film—with the streeties resilience and never-die-spirit.

A bunch of kidnappers lurk, an organ-harvesting racket is underway, dog-meat and other unthinkable things are hinted at, keeping Apu and his companion on their toes. A grumpy, grizzled policeman (Pawan Malhotra) is whistled up at the last minute to help in the rescue mission. Both Tripathi and Malhotra played key roles in director Amit Rai’s delightful previous outing OMG 2, a film that would be difficult to make today given our increasingly shrinking appetites for accommodating differences. In this one, Rajesh Kumar is an addition to the adults who can work well with kids.

It’s when Ohh My Dog gets into explanatory mode, underlining everything, that the film begins feeling stretched and over-simplified. A dash of religiosity feels superfluous, but thankfully it’s kept to a minimum. It’s left to our doggy heroes Momo and Oscar, along with Apu, to keep things moving, making this a kid-friendly expedition at the movies.

Ohh My Dog movie cast: Maahi Rai, Pankaj Tripathi, Rajesh Kumar, Pawan Malhotra, Geeta Aggarwal Sharma, Sulakhyana Baruah, Vijay Mishra, Nikhil Kumar, Bruno, Oscar
Ohh My Dog movie director: Amit Rai
Ohh My Dog movie rating: 2.5 stars