Red Dog takes another bite at the box office in nostalgia-tinged prequel True Blue

REVIEW: The filmmakers get away with more than they should in Red Dog: True Blue, the long-awaited prequel to the breakout 2011 canine hit.

RED DOG: TRUE BLUE

Stars: Three stars

Director: Kriv Stenders

Starring: Levi Miller, Bryan Brown, Phoenix

Rating: PG

Running time: 89 minutes

Verdict: One colourful canine

True Blue takes place in a long-ago time before laptops and social media existed, when free-range boys roamed the sunburnt countryside and grizzled old timers felt perfectly entitled to give their grandsons a good hiding when errant behaviour dictated it.

The long-awaited prequel to breakout 2011 hit Red Dog gives off a strong whiff of nostalgia — heightened by its Saturday matinee sensibility.

And the stunning red dirt Pilbara backdrop of Grandpa’s (Bryan Brown) remote cattle station further augments the film’s olde worlde feel.

Levi Miller and Phoenix are inseparable in True Blue. Picture: Supplied

Which is probably just as well, since True Blue’s appropriation a pointing-the-bone blackfella curse feels like it belongs to a bygone era in storytelling (Nicolas Roeg’s Walkabout, for example, or the 60s TV series Skippy.)

The scene in which 11-year-old Mick (Levi Miller) stumbles across a sacred aboriginal pool also feels culturally clumsy. (Whereas Red Dog’s rescue of him from said cave later in the piece just feels a little forced.)

But since Red Dog: True Blue plays out like a contemporary fable, told from a strangely naive point of view, the filmmakers get away with more than perhaps they should.

As the now grown-up Mick, British actor Jason Isaacs is the nominal narrator of the piece.

The overworked businessman has lost his sense of fun in the intervening 30-odd years.

But his childhood memories are reawakened when he reluctantly takes his two sons to see the original Red Dog movie.

True Blue becomes a kind of bedside story as Mick, now Michael, recounts his childhood exploits with what he believes to be the legendary canine.

Bryan Brown is upstaged by his canine co-star in True Blue. Picture: Supplied

The inseparable pair first encounter each other in the wake of a devastating cyclone that wreaks havoc on the Pilbara not long after Mick moves in with his grandpa (his mum, who is suffering from depression, can no longer take care of him.)

The film episodic narrative is as bumpy as a drive along a corrugated dirt road — the bushfire, for instance, arrives with as little preamble as Mick’s beautiful young governess (Hanna Mangan Lawrence) or mining baron Lang Hancock (John Jarratt).

And the comedy is as broad as the storytelling is ruff around the edges.

In short, True Blue has the same knockabout charm as its record-breaking predecessor, which took $21 million at the box office to become one of the most successful Australian films of all time.

The original Red Dog was played by Koko, who died in 2012 of heart disease. He is replaced in the prequel by Phoenix, a natural-born showman with impeccably timing and an arsenal of clever tricks.

He mugs for the camera mercilessly. That might be why he gets more close ups than his predecessor, who was more inclined to underplay his pivotal role.

Red Dog opens on Boxing Day. Advance family screenings on December 18.

Originally published as Red Dog takes another bite at the box office in nostalgia-tinged prequel True Blue