I’ve said in the past and still believe that Josh Hutcherson will be a pretty good adult actor if he chooses to go down that path. I liked his work in Little Manhattan and recently finished watching him in Bridge to Terabithia, but then he comes back and makes films like Firehouse Dog, which seem to flush away a lot of that goodwill in my opinion. He doesn’t try at all and becomes the typical sweet kid, rather than the intellectual who acts larger than his shoes.

Written by Mike Werb (Curious George) and Claire-Dee Lim and directed by Todd Holland (whose main director claims were directing fair shares of episodes for the shows Malcolm in the Middle and The Larry Sanders Show), the film centers around Rexxx, with three x’s, who is apparently a 21st century version of Benji, Old Yeller, or any other movie dog you’d like to slot in. During a stunt for his latest film, Rexxx accidentally falls from an airplane and lands in a truck full of tomatoes, so he doesn’t die of course. The movie would have to be called something other than Firehouse Dog if that were the case. But he does manage to get to New York, where Shane (Hutcherson) finds him and wants initially to get rid of him, before he finds out what the dog can do, despite the objections of his father (Bruce Greenwood, The Sweet Hereafter). But he grows to become part of the family more and more.