Dolittle

The character of Dr. Dolittle was created in 1920 by Hugh Lofting, who fashioned him as a veterinarian who can communicate with animals. The character has appeared in various film adaptations, the first of which was released in 1967 with Rex Harrison in the title role, and was a famously troubled production, partly due to Harrison being such a pain in the ass, and was a flop both critically and commercially. After that, Eddie Murphy played the doctor in a modernized version of the tale, which was a financial success, and garnered a sequel, plus three direct-to-video spinoff sequels starring Kyla Pratt.

Now, Robert Downey Jr has decided to try his hand at bringing the animal-loving doctor to the big screen with Stephen Gaghan (Gold) at the helm.

And…it’s pretty terrible.

Now, that’s not a huge shock; this film itself had a very troubled production, undergoing numerous reshoots under Jonathan Liebesman – aka the guy who made that awful Ninja Turtles movie – and constantly shuffling around release dates until finally being dumped in the cinematic dead zone known as January.

However, troubled productions like this sometimes signal a hilariously bad film, and unfortunately, this is just bad in a boring, rote-kids-film, disjointed-narrative-as-a-result-of-the-troubled-production sort of way. The only bits of entertainment are to be found in the adventure – i.e. Dolittle (Downey Jr) being tasked with finding a cure for the dying Queen of England (Jessie Buckley), accompanied by an eager-beaver apprentice (Harry Collett), and some animal friends voiced by Emma Thompson, Rami Malek, John Cena, and Kumail Nanjiani, to name a few – but it’s hard to get invested in it because you don’t care about any of the characters.

Now, part of that is due to extremely rushed pacing within the first ten minutes of the film, and the other part is due to the acting being hit and miss. Downey performs all of his dialogue in this odd whisper that renders him unintelligible half the time. Collet is bland as his apprentice, Carmel Laniado as the Princess gets little to do – why didn’t she tag along? – same with Antonia Banderas. The only performances I found to be good were all the voice performances for the animals and Michael Sheen chewing the scenery as the veddy British, uptight Mudfly, an old rival of Dolittle’s tasked with stopping him by Jim Broadbent as one of the Queen’s chairmen in an intrigue plot that I could not care about if I tried.

However, the disjointed nature of the film and the hit-and-miss acting all contribute to the film’s biggest problem: how it panders to kids. I am a proponent of the idea that making a kids film should not be an excuse to just slack off and do the bare minimum, but that’s all Dolittle seems content with, especially in terms of its humor. Sometimes there’s a funny bit, but for every one of those rare moments, there are about five others that are just pop culture jokes and references to other movies; again, par for the course when talking about a bad kids film.

I really tried to go in with an open mind on this one because I like Robert Downey Jr and I like movies with talking animals. But nope, this was pretty much as awful as it looked. One of the worst films of 2019 and we’re only more than two weeks into January.