Parents' Guide to Ace of Hearts

Dog lovers will pant over scenes that feature Ace, the brilliant star of this movie, but the scenes that dwell on his myopic police partner, Dan, bring the movie to a deadly standstill. The only character in Ace of Hearts smarter than Ace is Dan's dogged daughter, Julia. Though just a kid, she uses math and other skills to perform the intelligent detective work that neither Dan nor his superiors seem capable of.

Most irksome is a dad more interested in his dog than in his smart and helpful daughter. No parent, especially one with the patience to work with a trained animal, could be as stubbornly obtuse as Dan when it comes to responding to his own helpful and intelligent child's pleas for attention. We never see the dad do anything to indicate that he has any guiding philosophy, yet Julia often quotes him back to himself. It's as if he used to be smart, and she needs to remind him. In the same vein, a reporter sent to question Dan about the dog attack is absurdly rude and insensitive. It's a patently misleading characterization that suggests reporters would deliberately alienate people when in fact extra politeness is necessary in order to persuade reluctant subjects to cooperate.