Plot
Dogs and cats are secretly highly intelligent, capable of speech, and maintain spy agencies to protect the world. In Germany, a bloodhound named Rex discovers a Cocker Spaniel puppy stealing secret codes. The thief reveals herself to be Kitty Galore, a hairless Sphynx cat, in disguise. After she escapes, Rex alerts the agents that he has spotted her. At a San Francisco used car dealership, the mascot Crazy Carlito (dressed like Uncle Sam) plans to bomb the building. Police officer Shane Larson and his dog Diggs arrive on the scene. Diggs recklessly retrieves the detonator from Carlito but bites it in the process, blowing up the building. Butch and Lou, now a fully grown Beagle and the head of D.O.G. HQ, watch the incident. Lou wants to recruit Diggs as an agent, and Butch reluctantly agrees.
Diggs is locked in the police kennels to prevent further accidents. Butch brings him to D.O.G. HQ. After tracking down a pigeon named Seamus with valuable information, Diggs and Butch meet a M.E.O.W.S. (Mousers Enforcing Our World's Safety) agent named Catherine, who is also in pursuit of Seamus. Catherine reveals that Kitty Galore is a former M.E.O.W.S. agent named Ivana Clawyu who fell into a vat of hair removal cream in a cosmetics factory when a guard dog chased her while on a mission. Humiliated by her fellow agents, Kitty left M.E.O.W.S. and, thrown out by her former family due to her appearance, vowed revenge on cats, dogs and humans.
Lou forms an alliance with Tab Lazenby, head of M.E.O.W.S, to take down Kitty Galore. At a cat lady's home, the team discover that Calico, Mr. Tinkles' former aid, has been sending stolen technology to Kitty via pigeons. Diggs attacks Calico, who tries to drown the team in cat litter. They escape and interrogate Calico, who claims not to know Kitty's whereabouts but does know where his former boss is.
The team travels to Alcatraz, where Mr. Tinkles, mentally ill from his time with Mr. Mason's maid and her sisters, is confined. While he refuses to directly help them, he provides one clue: "A cat's eye reveals everything." When Kitty Galore learns that the cats and dogs have joined forces, she hires mercenaries Angus and Duncan MacDougall to kill Seamus on the boat returning from Alcatraz. Diggs subdues Angus and accidentally throws him overboard. Fed up with Diggs' mishaps completely ruining the mission, Butch dismisses him from the team and leaves with Seamus to salvage clues.
Catherine takes Diggs to her home where he meets her nieces who tickle his tummy. He's surprised they do not hate him as a dog, Catherine says they have not learned to hate dogs yet. He reveals that past experiences have made him unable to trust anyone, leading to difficulty following orders and spending most of his life in kennels. Catherine assures him if he continues to think that way, no one will be able to help him. Diggs realizes his error, and follows Catherine to M.E.O.W.S. HQ, where they learn with help from the clue Mr. Tinkles gave them that Kitty is hiding at a fairground with her new owner, amateur magician Chuck the Magnificent.
At the fair, Diggs and Catherine are captured by Kitty and her assistant, Paws. Kitty reveals her plot to transmit the "Call of the Wild", a frequency only dogs can hear that will make them hostile to humans. Kitty believes humans will abandon these unwanted dogs in kennels. Kitty tries to use the fair's flying swings ride as a satellite dish to broadcast the signal to an orbiting satellite. Diggs and Catherine escape after Diggs confess his feelings to Catherine and are joined by Butch and Seamus. Seamus presses a red button, believing it will shut down the ride, but he instead activates Kitty's signal. Dogs around the world begin to react. Paws battles them, revealing he is a robot; Diggs tricks him into biting the device's wires, destroying the satellite. Kitty's pet mouse Scrumptious, fed up with Kitty's abuse, launches the cat, leaving her covered in cotton candy and landing in Chuck's hat. With the mission a success, Diggs goes to live with Shane. Upon returning to H.Q., Diggs learns Mr. Tinkles has escaped prison with Calico.
In a post-credits scene, Tinkles is in paradise complaining about lacking deworming cream for his itching rear until Calico reminds him that he is still connected.
Reception
Box office
Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore earned $4,225,000 on opening day, and $12,279,363 on its opening weekend reaching #5 at the box office and having a $3,314 average from a very wide 3,705 theaters. In its second weekend, its drop was very similar to the first film, retreating 44% to $6,902,116 to 7th place and lifting its total to $26,428,266 in 2 weeks. It held better in its third weekend, dropping 39% to $4,190,426 and remaining in the Top 10. The film closed on October 21, 2010, after 84 days of release, earning $43,585,753 domestically. Produced on an $85 million budget, the film is considered a huge box office bomb, as it grossed less than half of the first Cats & Dogs, and failed to outgross Marmaduke . It earned an additional $69 million overseas for a worldwide total of $112.5 million. During its initial American theatre release, the film was preceded by the new 3D animated short film titled Coyote Falls with Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner. [5]
Critical response
Rotten Tomatoes, a review aggregator, reports that 13% of 99 surveyed critics gave the film a positive review; the average rating is 3.80/10. [6] The site's critical consensus reads: "Dull and unfunny, this inexplicable sequel offers little more than the spectacle of digitally rendered talking animals with celebrity voices." [6] On Metacritic, the film has a score of 30 out of 100 based on 22 critics, indicating "generally unfavorable reviews". [7] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B−" on an A+ to F scale, down from the first film's "B+". [8]
Joe Leydon of Variety called it "a faster, funnier follow-up" to the original film. [9] Scott Tobias of The A.V. Club negatively reviewed the film's plot, saying that "it's still about a feline plot for world domination, and the slobbering secret agents who stand in the way." [10] The film was nominated for a Golden Raspberry Award for "Worst Eye-Gouging Misuse of 3D", but it lost to The Last Airbender .
