This was a pleasant surprise -- not necessarily a good film, but more interesting than I expected
Far from a cruel parting gift from Javier, this was an interesting, affirmative film, but it was both mislabled from a marketing standpoint and mismarketed as a sports film.
As many of the film's subjects exclaim at the beginning of the film, Jamaica had a bobsled team, which became the subject of Disney's 'Cool Runnings', but 'Sun Dogs' is neither fiction, nor comedy -- it is a documentary by director Andrea Stewart, who sought to make a film about the efforts of Danny Melville and Devon Anderson to save some of the Bahamas stray dog dog population in by putting the dogs to work in some meaningful way.
Perhaps the dogs could have been retrained as guard-dogs, seeing eye dogs or drug seeking animals? All of this are viable canine careers, but training the animals as sled dogs (instead of putting them to sleep) seems something of a flamboyant stunt.
Then again, this whole enterprise was conceived and sponsored by Magaritaville founder and sometime musician Jimmy Buffet, so I guess the idea of taking Bahamian strays and subjecting them to sub-zero temperatures with the expectation that they perform in a strenouous competition might have sounded like a good idea.
While the Bahamian dogsled team might have started out as a humanitarian effort, I'm not sure that training the dogs on sand and then switching them to snow was the kindest of gestures.
While I find the goals of Melville, Anderson and the filmmakers noble, I'm not sure I can applaud the way they packaged it. It's a well made documenatary as it features good interviews and does a solid job profiling its human protagonists, but it's a documentary about Carribean dogsled racers for cryin' out loud!
As a travelogue and impact-study, 'Sun Dogs' may be well intentioned, but as a practical humanitarian program, it gets a 'D'. People who pick this up as a rental will likely be expecting a comedy based on the cover-art, so it gets a 'D' there as well.
Who was this film intended for, again?