Dog Man review – goofy gags galore as the Franken-pooch takes on a fiendish feline

Like an outbreak of head lice, there comes a moment in primary school when it turns out every kid in class has a copy of one of Dav Pilkey’s brilliantly silly graphic novels stuffed in their book bag. Now Pilkey’s bestselling Dog Man books (a spin-off of the Captain Underpants series) have been turned into a noisy, fun movie. First thing to overcome is the ick factor in the origin tale of how Dog Man came to have a man’s body and a dog’s head. The story goes that after a bomb explosion critically injures a police officer and his trusty canine sidekick, a nurse decides the only thing for it is to sew the dog’s head on to the officer’s body.

The resulting supercop is Dog Man, brought to screen in Pilkey’s hand-drawn Sharpie pen style. The Franken-pooch operation is a bit much for the policeman’s girlfriend, who leaves him for another man. Then Dog Man’s nemesis, Petey “the world’s most evilest cat”, busts out of jail. The fact that Petey speaks (and is voiced so entertainingly by Pete Davidson) makes him immediately twice as interesting as Dog Man, who only talks in woofs (barked by director Peter Hastings). With his daddy issues and parenting failures, Petey is also the emotional centre of the movie.

The anarchic plot finds Petey buying a cloning machine to better his chances of world domination. The result is a cute little kitten clone called Li’l Petey (Lucas Hopkins Calderon), that he is too emotionally damaged to parent. Petey abandons the little guy in a cardboard box.

Dog Man is packed with goofy gags that whizz past, with no let up from the hectic pace. It’s a movie with the energy levels of a classroom of six-year-olds on the last day of summer term – though it didn’t really have the kids packed into my screening laughing out loud. Though credit to the dad sitting at the end of the row who managed to rest his eyes for 80 minutes of the noisy, frenetic 89-minute running time.

• Dog Man is out in the US now, in the UK from 7 February, and in Australia from 3 April.