SPOILER REVIEW
Despite an attempt at a decent performance by Robert Downey Jr, Dolittle’s boring stock characters, brainless humour and lazy writing condemn it to failure.
Let me just preface this review by saying that I’m hardly the target audience for this sort of movie. Dolittle is your bog-standard take-the-whole-family kids’ summer movie that dropped in the middle of January. We obviously must be in some sort of slow season. Now that you and I are both aware of what type of film we’re talking about here, there are certain things you’d come to expect: decent(ish) performances, mild fantasy violence and a whole load of jokes for kids. Nothing great, but not totally intolerable for adults either. Dolittle isn’t that. Somehow it manages to be worse, borderline offensive even. The post-Marvel years are clearly not being kind to Robert Downey Jr.
The character of Doctor Dolittle, the vet and naturalist who has the ability to speak to all animals, first appeared in a number of children’s novels by author Hugh Lofting. The problem here is that no one behind this reboot seems to have given them much thought. Dolittle, played in this instance by Downey Jr., has lost his wife Lily who was shipwrecked and died in a storm. Now a recluse within the walls of his animal sanctuary, refusing all contact with the rest of his own species, Dolittle is stirred by the arrival of Lady Rose (Carmel Laniado), a princess who comes bearing a message: the Queen of England is deathly ill and only the doctor has the expertise to cure her. Dolittle finds that the queen has consumed a highly poisonous plant and only the fruit of the mythical Eden tree can cure her. Since her death would mean the Treasury would claim the land on which his sanctuary sits, Dolittle reluctantly sets out on a voyage to find this fruit, with his animal companions and new assistant Stubbins (Harry Collett) in tow.
The plot seems to have been carefully crafted to steer the audience away from excitement. That the film’s climax involves Downey Jr. removing rusted plate armour and bagpipes from a dragon’s rectum before advising it to eat more leafy greens is a pretty good summation of its overall quality. The few dangling plot threads and laughable dialogue are barely worth mentioning; your five-and-under kids won’t notice and if you’re an adult, going to Dolittle with your five-and-under kids is the only way you can claim any modicum of self-respect upon entering the theatre. Downey Jr. is the only standout, but that’s not saying much at all His character is irascible, clever and bighearted (all played convincingly) with a Welsh accent (only vaguely convincing). The only way to make Michael Sheen’s villain any more stereotypical would be to have him sporting a handlebar moustache with his endgame involving tying a damsel to some train tracks.
I can’t quite imagine what kind of silver-tongued casting director Universal employed to talk this many people into this gig. A frankly absurd number of big-name actors phone it in: Kumail Nanjiani as an ostrich, Octavia Spencer as a duck, Tom Holland as a bespectacled dog. The list goes to bizarre lengths up to the point where you’re questioning whether the end credits are genuinely real or just the result of someone having a laugh. Craig Robinson (Brooklyn 99’s Doug Judy) earns some laughs voicing Kevin the injured squirrel, who periodically makes logs about the “enemy” Stubbins, who accidentally shot him earlier, ingratiating himself with the crew. At the very least, most of them benefit in that playing CG animals with poorly synced mouths means they have some degree of plausible deniability regarding their involvement in Dolittle. The atrocious poop humour and fart jokes, which you’d expect from a kids’ film, are not only hammered home, but are actually part of the climax too. They’re accompanied only by a few adults-only in-jokes like a dragonfly musing over whether a scorpion has a bigger “stinger” than he does, or a polar bear (coincidentally voiced by John Cena) telling an ostrich about how his father “left for a pack of seals and never returned”. Unfortunately, this crass, eye-watering absurdity has to be seen to be believed.
We know kids’ films can be good. In fact, they can be very good and break convention, even if the genre as a whole has a mixed reputation amongst adults. Dolittle goes the opposite direction for reasons that aren’t totally clear, and predictably it flops hard. Your young kids might like it, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find that anyone even slightly older would have outgrown this dubious brand of comedy. Just take them to the zoo instead. The animals don’t talk but at least then you might all have some fun.
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