MovieChat Forums > The Mighty Celt (2005) Discussion > An American movie would NEVER have that ...

An American movie would NEVER have that ending


Disclaimer: There is a MAJOR spoiler in here. Don't read any further if you haven't seen the film. And no, I'm not a dog abuser. I don't beat my animals. I'm actually a dog person, and volunteered at a pet store for several years. I'll put some heavy spacing between here and the first paragraph, out of courtesy.
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Can you imagine if this movie had played to an American audience? The studio would have gotten so many angry letters. Anyways, why is there such a taboo against killing dogs in American films? They always seem to be bulletproof. The most blatant example is in Independence Day, where the Golden Retriever runs past exploding cars and doesn't get a scratch.

I know that the dog gets killed in Old Yeller. That, however, is done off-screen. In The Mighty Celt, the dog gets its throat slit, and you see it lying on the ground, in a pool of blood. I think that's a better way to show it. It's shocking for the audience, and they can understand the shock that poor kid must be feeling.

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Are you saying the ending works or doesn't? I'm still looking for this film and am keen to see it.

As for American films, the all-time greatest missed opportunity in the history of American cinema was, to my mind, in the mostly abysmal Michael (the one where John Travolta plays the warlike angel, Andie MacDowell's in it, etc.). There's that scene where the dog has died, Michael holds him in his arms and does some kind of God-connection thing, and life is brought back into the little furry body. Celebrations all around, etc. This is outside, across the street from a house, in a field, with a highway in between. You see where I'm going with this, right? What SHOULD have happened is, as they celebrate, tears going every which way, God be praised, the just-resurrected Lazarus (Dogzarus?) goes running across the road and gets plowed.

Come on. You woulda laughed.

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Isn't that kinda the partial premise for Pet Sematary?

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The cruel explicitness of that single scene works magnificently. I didn't expect it to happen, and it delivered to me a nasty shock (I just saw the movie at TV, here, in Romania). The cold and fast throat-cutting, followed by the boy's horrified expression and Celt's shot as he lies dead, with his slit throat oozing a puddle of blood, is a vivid image of the inhuman soul of all those who breed and raise dogs only as "tools" (as the cynical trainer states when he first wants to kill Celt), unable to perceive their true nature. That scene in itself is a sobering eulogy to all the dogs who were senselessly "sacrificed" and thrown like as many residue in the lake, all along the movie - and, by extension, to all cold-hearted and so-called "pragmatic" abuse against animals in the world. It's one of the reasons I loved so much this sensitive movie.

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