How to Kill Your Neighbor's Dog

2000 comedy

Rating: 13/20

Plot: An impotent and misanthropic playwright hasn't had a stage hit in a decade. And that's not his only problem. His wife is pressuring him to knock her up, the neighbors have an obnoxious dog, and his new eight-year-old neighbor won't leave him alone. Oh, and he has a stalker. It's enough to make a guy as moody as Hamlet.

I had my doubts about the comedic stylings of Kenneth Branagh, but he's got a nice character to play with here. And really, all he needs to do to pull off surly and misanthropic is have an accent. The character is the type of character that I usually like, but the movie meandered a little too much, and there were a couple-few scenes where Peter went from likably mean to just plain mean. The little girl (Suzi Hofrichter) was fine, but her character was a little too much like an eight-year-old girl to actually be likable. Far from the documentary on how to kill dogs that I thought this would be, it was an almost-funny way to pass some time but nothing I'm going to remember seeing in a week.