Underdog (DVD, 2007)

To save the day, here comes Underdog, a 1970s Saturday morning cartoon transformed to glorious, semi-CGI animated life; it's a talking animal live-action film--à la BABE--with wisecracks aplenty. Voiced by Jason Lee, Underdog is the joke of the K-9 police force after his weakness for ham disrupts a public ceremony. Dejectedly, he lets himself get abducted for an animal experiment by a mad scientist, Dr. Simon Barsinister (Peter Dinklage). He escapes, doused in experimental chemicals, to become a dog with 80 times his normal strength. Jim Belushi embodies the sad-sack security guard at the laboratory who finds Underdog and takes him home as a playmate for his alienated tweener son (Alex Neuberger). The fact that chaos follows will come as no surprise, but what may is the genial tone the film maintains throughout. UNDERDOG blends its CGI animation and live action with finesse, and with performances that are breezy and in-on-the-same-joke. Lots of the humor in Underdog plays off the fact that he needs to curb his baser habits, since he's the type to dig bones deep into the earth, fly through walls, and shatter glass with his bark. Dinklage plays the evil scientist with a welcome restraint and Malkovich-ian archness; his evil assistant (Patrick Warburton) makes good use of a thesaurus for his evil declarations. Taylor Momsen plays the neighborhood tweener damsel in distress, who happens to have a cute girl dog, voiced by Amy Adams.