Both movies, Turner and Hooch and K-9 were good films. Comedies with both a good story and good actors in the cast. Top Dog is a recycled version of something trying to market itself to be another K-9 or Turner and Hooch king of movie. Top Dog lacked a strong actor such as Tom Hanks or great comedy like in K-9. Chuck Norris, who has done a number of excellent action films and went off to do a successful television series (Walker: Texas Ranger), could not hold this film together. For a child's movie, maybe, this film could be considered something decent, but it failed to find an audience older than 13. It is obvious that the studios wanted a summer comedy with some karate style action. What they produced was a mistake.

Never since ALADDIN (1986, Bud Spencer) has there been a movie on drugs designed for family audiences young and old. And what makes a "family" movie? A scrungy old mutt and a boy on a bike! There's more, too! Chuck Norris gets to have a faithful companion who can outwit and outsmart terrorist scum! It's got a mass overload of everything your kids would appreciate! Fiery explosions, handguns, criminal organizations, the Pope, and bomb threats add more to your viewer-friendly pleasure, and...... I'll stop right there! Unless you can't handle what's in store in TOP DOG, please don't pick this one up! The combination of violent action with family-based material is an outrageous atrocity one will not want to believe. It suffers miserably on originality and plot, making this your cookie-cutter actioner. Mommy won't approve this flick to Johnny and Sally, even if it is rated PG-13!

(Plot) Reno's (The Dog) partner (Carmine Caridi) gets shot and killed when he decides to snoop around some terrorists. The duo is replaced by a moody cop who can't keep his house clean, and doesn't like company very much. Can Chuck get along with Reno to save everyone from the baddies?

Lame jokes in the summary aside... This is it. The movie that officially knocked Chuck off of his throne; he was already beginning to show cracks with Hellbound, The Hit-man, and a couple others, but this is the one that did him in. Chuck should have known better to go the James Belushi route here. I dig Chuck for what he is, but he doesn't have the funny personality to pull this off. The movie looks and feels extremely cheap, even though it somehow managed to get a theatrical release. There isn't a whole lot of action to speak of, other than a few explosions here and there, and a rather lame shootout & chase scene at the end. It also has all the antics you would expect from this movie. The dog steals the show from under Chuck Norris, even though he's a rather unlikable little thing. The villains have no character to speak of, and are just there, so Chuck has someone to overcome. I love action movies, but this just reeked of laziness. Chuck Norris was always a bit of a risk when it came to his movies, but at least he made a few good ones. It feels like he's not even trying here. He puts on a phony tough guy act that I didn't buy for a minute, and effectively put the final nail in the coffin of his career.

Final Thoughts: if you wanna see Chuck succumb his standards to James Belushi's K-9 series, then be my guest. Be prepared to wallow in misery for most of the duration, though. It's pretty awful stuff. This killed Norris's action movie career. He does some DTV films once in a while, and most recently had a glorified cameo in The Expendables II

2/10