For All You Freaks Who Want To Date Your Pets, ‘Unleashed’ Is On Netflix

This week we celebrated the past year in cinema with the 2018 Oscar nominations, and for some inexplicable reason, Steve Howey’s turn in Unleashed was left off the list. It’s like The Academy missed his performance as Summit, a silky lab turned blonde beefcake Sam, a man who has a penchant for humping the office copy machine and other inanimate objects.

Yes, this is the premise for Unleashed, a 2017 comedy starring Kate Micucci as Emma, an app designer whose pets run off during a full moon, and a cosmic event turns them into human men. Summit the dog becomes Sam the man, with all the same qualities: loves to run, is super friendly and loyal, and yes, loves to hump stuff. Ajax the cat becomes Diego (Justin Chatwin), a slinky model whose bitchy personality lets viewers know that he surely used to be a cat. They each decide to “woo” Emma to get back with their owner, and use the posters the adorable and reliable Carl (Sean Astin) put up all over town as their way to get in touch with her.

Unleashed is completely and utterly ridiculous, reaching a new level of silly that it proudly owns. Watching Chatwin and Howey, the studs from Shameless, interpret animal behavior as grown men will make you laugh despite your best judgment. Howey in particular, from jumping into a pool to sniffing around humans, is simply so damn goofy as the human version of a playful pup, and gives the film an effort its unworthy of, but one that provides a legitimacy nonetheless. You can’t help but appreciate these guys really going for it and leaning into a totally wild concept with such reckless abandon.

It’s certainly a new variation on the romantic comedy genre, but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t become overly apparent about four minutes into the film where the story is going, and where it will end up. It feels like a storyline a TGIF show would explore when they were looking to be exceptionally weird, and throughout viewing the film, you can’t help but guess the writer/director Finn Taylor was very high while coming up with this concept, but not quite as high as the people who paid for this film to be made.

If you too are planning to partake at home, Unleashed isn’t the worst streaming choice you could make. It’s pleasant enough, and again, watching Chatwin and Howey act like total goofballs has its perks. At just over 90 minutes, the comedy could’ve done without at least 15-20 minutes of the padding used to inject some emotion and a very tiny dose of reality into it, which rounds out the emotional aspects that never get too deep, but are used to keep the film from running entirely wild. While ultimately a bit bland, Unleashed does employ enough comedy that, unfortunately, might not dissuade the real weirdos from wanting to date their pets. So let me do the honors: you might enjoy some cuddles on the couch while watching this movie together, but please, don’t try to date your pets.

Where to watch Unleashed