Review of Rescued by Ruby (2022) by Pabloretana — 31 Mar 2022

Daniel O’Neil (Grant Gustin) is a Rhode Island state trooper who dreams of joining the K9 unit. He is “qualified in a bunch of other trooper specialties”, such as “hostage negotiating, EVOC training, peer-to-peer counseling, honor guard, boat team, dive team,” but his dream eludes him because “K9 team requires calm and focus.” And hostage negotiating doesn’t? Captain Zarella (Scott Wolf) sure runs a tight ship, if he can afford to reject, because he “can't even sit still,” a guy who is supposedly qualified to negotiate with violent criminals.

Dan won’t take ‘no’ for an answer, though, especially after his wife Melissa (Kaylah Zander) gives him the news that they’re expecting a second child. Promotion to K9 “It's a step up, a raise. We'll finally be able to pay off college loans, save for our kids, maybe get a bigger house someday.” Unless these dogs are trained to find drugs which the troopers would then resell, I find these claims of financial independence rather hard to believe.

Dan discovers that a K-9 dog doesn't have to be a $10,000 German Shepherd, as Zarella had led him to believe when he told Dan that “The department has no money for new dogs.” Dan then goes to a shelter and adopts the titular Ruby, a half border collie that looks like Laddie but behaves like Santa’s Little Helper. Yada yada yada, Dan and Ruby make the K9 unit.

All of this is ostensibly “based on a true story,” but I call bullsh*t. The climax involves Dan and Ruby finding a boy who got lost while hiking. This boy turns out to be the son of Pat (Camille Sullivan) the woman who runs the shelter where Dan found Ruby. Pat, who up until this point we had absolutely no idea even had a son, let alone that he’d gotten lost in the woods, had saved Ruby from being put down just prior to Dan adopting her. Rhode Island is the smallest U.S. state by area, but it can’t be this small.

That, however, it’s just the tip of the bullsh*t iceberg. Before the closing credits we get a Where Are They Now? Epilogue, complete with photos of the characters’ real-life counterparts. One such picture is labeled “The O’Neil Family,” and in it we can see that the real Melissa is about three times the size of the actress playing her.