There are two kinds of people in this world — those who like golden retrievers, and...just kidding, there's only one kind of people.
I should also tell you upfront that before writing this review, I read a 348-page book about the real dog, Buddy. To be fair, at least a third of it is about the author.
I'll admit I tried watching AIR BUD once before and checked out after twenty minutes. The IMDb rating of 5.4 didn't exactly inspire confidence, and I went in looking for immediate absurdity rather than what the movie actually is — a family sports film that isn't in any hurry to earn its premise. That was my mistake, not the movie's.
GO, BUDDY! — the book written by Kevin DiCicco, the man who found and trained Buddy — changed my approach entirely. The real story isn't what you'd expect. He was a scraggly, pinecone-obsessed stray that DiCicco stumbled across in the Sierra Nevada, nursed back to health, and then discovered almost by accident had a peculiar gift for basketball.
The talent snowballed organically — AMERICA'S FUNNIEST HOME VIDEOS, then David Letterman's Stupid Pet Tricks, then Disney. Hollywood didn't manufacture Buddy. It just scaled up something that already existed.
Knowing that going in makes the movie feel less like cynical product and more like a document of something that actually happened to a real animal. That's a better starting point for a review.
AIR BUD opens with a kid who has lost his father and a dog who has lost his dignity. Josh Framm is twelve, quiet, and new to Fernfield, Washington — though you'd pick up on the Pacific Northwest setting less from anything the movie tells you and more from the casual Shawn Kemp references. The grief isn't milked. The movie establishes it, respects it, and then lets the dog do the therapeutic heavy lifting.
What's refreshing about AIR BUD is how unapologetically sincere it is about all of this. It knows exactly what it is — a movie about a golden retriever who plays basketball — and it never once tries to be anything else. There's no winking at the camera, no meta-commentary, no attempt to justify its own premise. It simply commits, which turns out to be harder to pull off than it looks.
The villain of the piece is Norm Snively, an alcoholic clown who loses Buddy during a disastrous birthday party performance in the opening scene. Michael Jeter plays him with a particular brand of desperation that edges closer to the seedy birthday clown from UNCLE BUCK than broad slapstick. He's not scary exactly, but he's genuinely unsettling in the way that only a failing clown can be. The movie wisely never tries to rehabilitate him. He crashes his truck into a lake while drunk, shows up uninvited to a championship basketball game, and eventually gets his case dismissed by a judge who can barely conceal his contempt. It's a fitting end for a man who opened the film by nearly choking on a plate-spinning stick.
The abusive coach who throws basketballs at children gets fired early enough that the movie doesn't have to spend much time justifying it. In his place comes Arthur Chaney, played by Bill Cobbs, a retired pro who has quietly ended up as the school handyman. The movie doesn't explain how he got there, and it doesn't need to. Cobbs brings enough quiet authority to the role that you fill in the blanks yourself. There's a dignity to the character that the film earns without spelling anything out — a private man with a complicated past who decides to invest in a lonely kid and a dog. He brings genuine warmth to what could have easily been a throwaway mentor role, and he elevates every scene he's in, including a courtroom moment late in the film that works almost entirely because of him.
One of the film's more underrated choices is what it doesn't do. There are maybe three songs in the entire movie, including a track you'd hear at any basketball game, and even the film score barely makes its presence known. For a mid-90s family film, that's almost radical restraint. AIR BUD trusts the story and the performances to do the work. Deliberate or not, it was the right call.
AIR BUD also gets the ratio right. There is enough dog without it ever overwhelming the human story, and enough human story without the dog feeling like an afterthought. That balance is harder to achieve than it sounds — either the animal becomes a gimmick or the humans overwhelm it. Here the two storylines breathe together. Josh's grief arc has room to develop alongside Buddy's presence rather than being swallowed by it. The chemistry between Kevin Zegers and Buddy feels genuine, and a lot of it is. Much of the film is simply the two of them playing together, loosely edited but emotionally real.
If the film has a structural weakness it's that the basketball stakes never quite build the way they should. The championship game arrives almost without warning — announced in a single throwaway line from a commentator — and the movie hasn't done enough work to make you feel the journey to get there. Ironically, the original concept had Buddy helping a struggling team reach the finals through a proper playoff arc. That version of the film would have given the basketball more weight. What we get instead is competent but a little thin. Though there's a case to be made that this was partly intentional — the abusive coach who opened the film was obsessed with winning, and replacing him with Chaney meant shifting the value system away from trophies and toward something less measurable. A full championship run might have sent the message right back in the wrong direction.
Here's where the review takes a turn.
The dog who played Buddy was actually named Buddy. Kevin DiCicco found him as a scraggly stray in the Sierra Nevada in 1989, nursed him back to health, and gradually discovered that this particular dog had an inexplicable affinity for basketball. The trick was less graceful than it looks — a slightly deflated ball covered in olive oil, propelled off Buddy's nose and into the basket — but it was completely real. No CGI, no camera tricks. Roger Ebert apparently assumed it was digital effects, which says less about the movie and more about how low his expectations were going in.
Buddy made his name on AMERICA'S FUNNIEST HOME VIDEOS and David Letterman's Stupid Pet Tricks before Disney came calling. He also made a one-episode cameo as Comet on FULL HOUSE — specifically for a basketball scene with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, which makes perfect sense.
Buddy was already older than he looked during filming. DiCicco had found him as a stray and never knew his exact age. The production touched up the white on his muzzle for certain shots. By the time the movie came out in the summer of 1997, Buddy had been diagnosed with bone cancer. He had his right hind leg amputated that fall and began chemotherapy. Disney quietly distanced themselves, concerned that a three-legged dog undergoing cancer treatment might upset the children they were marketing the film to. You can't entirely blame them for the logic even if the coldness of it stings.
Buddy died in February 1998, in his sleep. He was ten minutes away from meeting his own puppies.
Kevin DiCicco did genuine good with Buddy's fame. Hospital visits, charity appearances, bringing joy to kids who needed it. That counts for something. But the real story around Buddy is messier than the movie it inspired. There were legal disputes, questions of ownership, a franchise that grew well beyond anyone's original intentions — one DiCicco never really benefited from. As recently as 2024 he was facing homelessness. The man who found a stray dog in the woods and turned him into a cultural phenomenon doesn't own the rights to that phenomenon.
None of this tarnishes Buddy. That's the thing about dogs — they stay pure even when the humans around them get complicated. The contracts, the disputes, the sequels don't touch him. What survives is the image of a golden retriever bumping a basketball into a hoop like it's the most natural thing in the world, and the collective memory of every kid who saw it and believed.
At some point Buddy stopped belonging to one person and started belonging to culture. That's how myth works. The human discovers, the dog performs, the audience believes, and the story detaches from its origin. What defines him is simpler than any of that.
GO, BUDDY! ends with a chapter written from the perspective of Buddy II, one of five golden retriever puppies gathered around a basketball, each one carrying something forward. The game continues. That's not a bad note to end on — for the book, for the dog, or for this review.
Final Verdict: 74 out of 100
