“A movie cannot survive on just being cute alone. It has to actually make choices that are good.”
When newly separated exes (Charlie Cox and Zooey Deschanel) share custody of their dog, Merv, the joint arrangement leaves the pup severely depressed. To cheer him up, they end up on the same sunny beach vacation together. Merv’s spirits instantly lift, but his owners are forced to navigate rising tensions in a lose-lose dynamic—unless spending time together rekindles what they once had.
I probably would have never seen this movie if it weren’t for the main stars of the film: Charlie Cox and Zooey Deschanel. I love both of them. It’s been forever since I’ve seen Zooey in anything, and Charlie Cox, of course, is hugely popular as Daredevil right now. So to see him in a rom-com, of all things, was very interesting to say the least.
But really, the main people that were going to watch this movie... why are they going to watch it? It’s a dog movie, and as a dog movie, it is what you expect it to be. It is very on the nose. They are laying everything on thick. This movie is not a very good movie in terms of anything. I wouldn’t have been that surprised if it was released on the Hallmark Channel, because it kind of has that same fluffy nature to it.
When you look at the poster, what you see is what you get... the good, the bad, the messy, everything about it.
So let’s talk about the positives of Merv. It is cutesy-poopsie. Literally, that is what this movie is. The strongest positive of Merv is just the fact that it’s cute. It’s not just a dog movie. Technically speaking, it’s a dog holiday movie, which is even more fluffy and daffy than what you would normally get with a dog movie. You already know from the fact that it’s a holiday film that the dog is probably not going to die at the end. So really, it’s just going to be about this couple spending time together while the dog does cute doggie things.
And that is exactly what happens in this movie. And that’s it. That is the only positive that I can say about the movie: it’s cutesy-poopsie. And that is not the only thing a movie needs to be in order to be successful, to be good, and to be worth watching.
Now, I wouldn’t say that the rest of the movie is negative. It’s not, actually. This is a very safe movie. A lot of the stuff that happens throughout the movie is neither here nor there. It completely goes over your head; it doesn’t matter.
However, there are a lot of negatives. So let’s go ahead and talk about the negatives for Merv.
Like I said in the beginning, this is a movie that just lays everything a little bit too thick and spoon-feeds the audience way too much from beginning to end. There’s a lot of stereotypes going on in the movie, including a token Black guy who also acts as the comic relief. He just shows up every now and then, pokes his head in, cracks a few jokes, and then disappears again.
While they’re on this beach vacation, there’s this stereotypical hot girl that accidentally stumbles onto the main guy of the film. “Oops, oh my goodness, you’re so cute, want to go to a party of mine?” And then, of course, that makes Zooey Deschanel’s character very jealous. Then the same thing happens at the party, where a very typical hot guy stumbles onto Zooey’s character, and then Charlie Cox gets all paranoid and delusional. The whole movie is just a bunch of these moments that we’ve seen a million times, and it doesn’t matter. Nobody cares, because there’s also not a ton of chemistry between the two leads.
Should there be? I guess maybe that would have made the movie just a little bit better, but barely. Because at the end of the day, you can’t escape all the stereotypes. You can’t escape the horrible dialogue choices throughout the movie. It’s completely predictable. You know exactly how it’s going to end. It really just comes down to the question of what’s going to change to get them together.
One thing they tease throughout the movie and take forever to answer is: what was it? What was it that happened that made them break up in the first place? Once you find out, is it really dramatic, deep, emotional, and resonating? No. It is, you guessed it, stereotypical... something that you hear a lot of times in movies. And you don’t care, because you don’t really believe it, because the entire thing is just cutesy-poopsie the entire time.
And it is what it is. Look, I’m not going to say this a million different times, okay? The movie is what it is, but a movie cannot survive on just being cute alone. It has to actually make choices that are good. It has to be different; it has to be unique.
It blows my mind that movies like this get greenlit all the time for no real reason other than to be cute. Meanwhile, there are literally websites you can go to where scripts have been sitting around for decades collecting dust, waiting to be greenlit, and so many of them are so much more original and far more interesting than anything like this. So it kind of blows my mind that you can get a movie like this greenlit for no other reason than:
It’s cute.
They cast people like Charlie Cox, who is currently popular, and Zooey Deschanel, who was an “it girl” at one point in her life, so we recognize her.
This is not a movie that is important to watch. Like I said, though, a majority of the film is made up of safe decisions, meaning that technically there’s not a lot of bad negatives going on... it’s just that a lot of stuff goes over your head, and there are more negatives than there are positives.
So at the end of the day, my end score is 42%... 42 out of 100 possible stars, which is a 2 out of 5 on Letterboxd.
But yeah, that’s it. That’s all I got. Have you seen Merv? Are you a fan of this movie, or do you have a guilty pleasure when it comes down to cutesy-poopsie dog movies? Let me know in the comments section down below, because I do believe that there are some cutesy-poopsie dog movies that are worth a watch, but they need to be different. They need to stand out in some way or another. Leave your thoughts about that in the comment section below.
