Genre:
Adventure, Comedy, Family
Produced by:
Jeff Kirschenbaum, Joe Roth, Susan Downey
Directed by:
Stephen Gaghan
Written by:
Stephen
Gaghan, Dan Gregor, Doug Mand
Production Company: Universal Pictures
Starring: Robert Downey Jr., Antonio
Banderas, Michael Sheen, Harry Collett, Jessie Buckley, Carmel Laniado, Ralph
Ineson, Kasia Smutniak, Emma Thompson, Rami Malek, John Cena, Kumail Nanjiani,
Octavia Spencer, Tom Holland, Craig Robinson, Ralph Fiennes, Selena Gomez,
Marion Cotillard, Frances de la Tour
Runtime: 102 minutes
SYNOPSIS:
After the death of his wife Lily (Kasia Smutniak), the grief-stricken
doctor and veterinarian John Dolittle (Robert
Downey Jr.) decides to withdraw from society, hiding behind the high walls
of Dolittle Manor with only the animals to keep him company. That ends when
Tommy Stubbins (Harry Collett) sneaks
his way into the mansion, appointing himself as his apprentice. But that is
only the beginning of a long globetrotting adventure as the pair must find a fruit
in the Eden tree to cure the ailing Queen Victoria (Jessie Buckley).
REVIEW:
Conceived originally by English author Hugh Lofting in 1920 through the children’s
novel the Story of Doctor Dolittle, Doctor
John Dolittle emerges as one of those rare, timeless literary characters both
kids and adults who grew up with it cannot help but come back again and again
and deservedly so. Lofting’s novel
had such an ingenious idea that represented every kids’ wildest dream: being a
doctor who can talk to animals and understand them. From that premise alone, Doctor
Dolittle continues to capture the imagination of many all around the world, even
to this day. It inspires Lofting to
write over fifteen more Dolittle/Dolittle-related adventures before he died in 1947. Soon after, his novel
series became movies, one of the most-adapted, where it enjoyed more financial
success despite the generally poor critical reception. Rex Harrison holds the distinction of being the first man to take
up the Dolittle mantle on the silver screen with the critically-derided, but Oscar-nominated
Doctor Dolittle (1967) before Eddie Murphy gave the character a
modern-day makeover with Dr. Dolittle
(1998) and Dr. Dolittle 2 (2001). Let’s
not forget the three direct-to-DVD Dolittle movies starring Kyla Pratt and the cartoon show in the
70’s. Since Dr. Dolittle: Million Dollar
Mutts (2009) though, the franchise has been in the doldrums.
And it took Hollywood until 2020 to
green-light another Dolittle cinematic adventure: Dolittle. As far as casting goes, it’s stacked with all of the
who’s who of today’s pop culture, ranging from Tom Holland, Selena Gomez
and John Cena in voice roles to Antonio Banderas and Michael Sheen in live-action roles. Easily,
the movie’s most important bit of casting news is Robert Downey Jr. playing the titular role in his first non-MCU
role since the Judge (2014). So far
so good, right? But then there is the bane of production issues, with Universal
being forced to hire uncredited creative talents/supposedly family-friendly
entertainment experts like Jonathan
Liebesman of the live-action Teenage
Mutant Ninja Turtles (2014) fame and Chris
McKay of the Lego Batman Movie
(2017) fame to help credited writer-director Stephen Gaghan out.
Not even their contribution can salvage Gaghan’s
Dolittle from being a colossal,
rudderless $175 million waste of potential and time. This movie is a misguided,
misjudged dumpster fire destined for the dumping ground month of January. It’s a
prime example of a big-budget project that has all the right ingredients for
something that’s at the very least good, true, but they’re so half-baked that those
same ingredients end up being just the exact wrong kinds for this type of
material. Bereft of any genuine vision and inspiration, Dolittle reeks of studio’s intervention, an enterprise concocted from
disparate elements solely to tick all of the clichéd boxes for the bare minimum
of an okay, forgettable kids’ movie. Anything resembling the Gaghan’s cut looks like it has been
thrown into the meat grinder, ripped to shreds, scattered all over the place
and, in the studio’s mad dash to get a “finished product” out, the pieces are
then shoddily taped back together with scotch tapes, made apparent by the
absurd amount of ADR. Anytime the human characters speak, the sound fades away into
the background, abruptly so, and frenetic cutting is present with the best
intentions of smoothing over the dubbing parts, only for it all to be as mildly
convincing as Tommy Wiseau’s ADR
work in the Room (2003).
And whatever little that’s left from his movie is still a lost cause. Renowned
for making hard-hitting political dramas like Traffic (2000) and Syriana
(2005), Dolittle finds the filmmaker
out of his depth in his first foray
into the blockbuster and family-friendly entertainment territory in a way that
seems like it’s too much of a stretch for him. Gaghan’s inexperience with the larger scale of the production and
the specific requirements of the given genre clearly shows, with muddled tone and
bizarre directorial choices robbing the movie from any sense of childlike
wonder.
The movie can’t decide if it wants to be
a slapstick comedy, a swashbuckling adventure or a sentimental tearjerker,
achieving none with any of them. His direction is baffling, with his real time,
quasi-documentary style, consisting mostly of a few in-your-face close-ups too
many, being an awkward fit for a fantastical world in dire need of a more ambitious
mind and grandiose sweep. The movie hardly ever gives a general idea of the
vastness, weirdness and the lived-in nature of Dolittle’s world, instead using Gaghan’s approach as a weak excuse to hide the artificial look
permeating the screen, which is ironic since it somehow makes everything look even
more artificial, whether it’s the low-rent Disneyland sets or the animals’ cartoonish
CGI. The animals are by no means as ugly to look at as the Jellicle cats in Cats (2019). They are above average at
best. At the same time, the CGI looks so incredibly noticeable and disjointed
from the live-action elements, particularly in scenes when the human characters
are interacting with the animals, it’s hard to suspend the disbelief, even if
it’s a fantasy movie.
Making things worse is the fact that Gaghan, who also serves as Dolittle’s screenwriter alongside Dan Gregor and Doug Mand, manages to be as equally responsible for a badly-written
screenplay that pays scant opportunity to a story arc that is much better than
the one they actually focus on, which is the relationship between John Dolittle
and his late wife Lily.
For that matter, Dolittle comes across as a missed opportunity to take the
aforementioned arc even further, considering how it imbues its first five to
ten minutes with rare glimpses of greatness. It’s got a sufficiently effective
mix of children’s storybook magic, human, occasionally poignant touch and
personal weight that much of the movie is missing, with an all-too-brief, fairy
tale-esque summation of how Dolittle begins embracing his ability to talk to
animals by assuming the role of an animal doctor, how Lily inspires him to
become who he is and how her death during a sea voyage makes him lose his will
to be a doctor, all of which are narrated with wonderfully otherworldly aura by
the doctor’s beloved parrot Polly (Emma
Thompson). It’s funny, sweet and tragic all at once, a fun little short
movie that’s good enough to get a feature-length treatment. That opening
sequence visually looks more refreshing and different from every other live-action
kids’ movies, emphasized by Gaghan’s
clever decision to tell the story with hand-drawn, 2D animated technique, an
art form that major studios have sadly abandoned in favor of 3D computer
animation these days and one that Dolittle
gladly resurrects, despite its limited screentime, as a welcome throwback to
the 1990’s Disney Renaissance era.
But things quickly go downhill beyond
that, where the sprightliness of the animated sequence is then replaced with
the dourness of the live-action sequences. Slowly but surely, its tale of a man
overcoming grief gets lost deeper in the shuffle of an otherwise generic action-adventure
plot recycled from every Disney-lite family-friendly blockbuster that’s been
out these past few months. It’s so preoccupied with going bigger that the
emotional resonance of Lily in Dolittle’s character development becomes a mere,
distant afterthought. Lily is a looming spectral presence that’s more spectral
than looming, referenced only once in awhile through a small handful of
flashbacks and later, shoehorned in as a pointless MacGuffin to get him to an
even more important MacGuffin.
For the most part though, Dolittle spends too much time setting up
this ludicrous narrative arc that Dolittle’s life is at stake because, down in
Buckingham Palace, Queen Victoria is dying, a fictionalized version of the
real-life personality who has no real history or attachment whatsoever to
Dolittle prior to the movie, save for one throwaway line by a young royal Lady
Rose (Carmel Laniado). The
screenplay struggles to give Queen Victoria much of any characterization
outside of her function as a plot device that triggers a wild goose chase between
the principal characters to find the fruit in the Eden tree, an object that’s
nothing more than an Elixir of Life kind of MacGuffin. This only makes Dolittle’s
adventure feel largely impersonal and disposable, as if he’s just going through
the motions of another filler-type mission. His journey and supposedly perilous
encounters lack any impactful ramifications and consequences, rendering it irrelevant
as to what’s happening next, whether the good guys survive or not. It’s truly an
exercise in shameless cash grab over storytelling, a sorry attempt at turning a
gentle literary classic into a noisy, bloated theme park thrill ride in the
vein of the Pirates of the Caribbean
movies, in which it should not have been.
It doesn’t help
that Gaghan himself seems
unsure about how to approach the John Dolittle character. Dolittle wants to have
its cake and eat it too -- grounding the doctor in as much humanity and realism
as possible, like what every 21st century reboot is doing at the
moment, while also having him be this zany, caricaturish Jack Sparrow-type adventurer
ripped straight out of a Sunday morning comic strip, and the result is neither
compelling nor entertaining. Simply said, it’s a hodgepodge of ideas in search
of a character that is never really there on the page.
Dolittle’s bumbling
antics stick out like a sore thumb in a high sea swashbuckler that could use a bit
more assured action hero and the same can be said about his medical expertise. In
fact, the scenes of Dolittle actually being an animal doctor feel very much
tacked-on, included only to remind its audience every once in awhile that Dolittle is indeed an adaptation of the Lofting’s book, a tale about the famed
animal doctor, which contradicts heavily with its chosen plot that’s clearly
about something else. Gaghan
completely misses the boat of its source material’s appeal, offering little to
no insight of what it’s like to be in Dolittle’s shoes besides maybe a couple
sequences. Even in those few sequences, they’re a hard, arduous stare into a comedy,
drama (just whatever genre it’s going for, who knows) dead zone. Anything that
could provoke a semblance of human responses has been reduced to witless
banters, hollow emotions and below-the-belt bathroom humor.
For one, atypical
for a kids’ movie, Dolittle presents
the different perspectives of how other people and Doctor Dolittle react to the
doctor’s animal-talking ability in the most horrifying fashion. There is one sequence
early on that alternates between the waiting room and the doctor’s operating
room when in the former location, the two kids Tommy Stubbins and Lady Rose see
Dolittle interact with the animals and all they hear are everyone doing animals
noises (e.g. if Dolittle talks to a dog, all they hear is the two barking), and
in the latter, those animal noises become human conversations, creating the
impression throughout the movie that what the audience has been hearing as Dolittle
and the animals speaking in human language are actually them speaking in animal
noises. And the longer this bit goes on, the more off-putting than cute it
becomes, making the possibly enchanting moment of Doctor Dolittle talking to
the animals look like he is high on the crazy pills, an Arthur Fleck kind of
lunatic without the Joker clown make-up.
In a way, Dolittle is a movie riddled with jarring
tonal transition, lurching carelessly from the vengeful Barry the Tiger (Ralph Fiennes) about to go for Dolittle’s
throat to him cuddling in the doctor’s arms, talking about maternal abandonment
like it’s some therapy session and, in its quest to give the term “jumping the shark”
a new name, it then hurtles closer into raunchy comedy, which has been toned down
for PG-rating and child consumption but it’s still raunch nonetheless, in a
standard-issue fantasy lair sequence that begins with a fire-breathing dragon
Ginko-Who-Soars (Frances de la Tour)
trying to kill Dolittle (what’s up with these carnivorous creatures hating on
the doctor, anyway?) which devolves into an insane, WTF sequence of the doctor
performing a surgery on a dragon, getting farted at in the face in the process
and ending up with him pulling a bagpipe out of its/her rear end. This is pure excremental
cinema at its finest, folks.
That speaks
volume about the animal’s characterization or lack thereof in this movie, where
they are not necessarily characters as they are more of a broad, one-note joke talking
head with dialogue so anachronistic and ill-suited for its Victorian period
setting they’re essentially animals possessed by the soul of a Millennials and “comedic
material” that veers so wildly from Gaghan
having a faint clue of who his target audience is to being clueless of it. Dolittle is loaded with fart jokes and,
oddly enough, obscure pop culture references galore, the latter of which will
probably leave the kids scratching their heads in confusion. Out of the blue,
the movie pulls the one-two punch of a duck Dab Dab (Octavia Spencer) mimicking Chris
Tucker’s famous line from Rush Hour
(1998) and a horde of insects negotiating in a way that’s reminiscent of the
mob epic the Godfather (1972), but these
comedic efforts fall by the wayside because these references are way too old,
not only for the kids, but even for some of their parents. And there’s no
satirical point or edge to them, referencing just for the sake of referencing,
which pales in comparison to the sharp way Zootopia
(2016) pokes fun at the Godfather,
for instance. A paranoid gorilla Chee Chee (Rami Malek), his relationship with Dolittle and the various pep
talks they have are the closest the movie has to a fleshed-out animal character
and arc, and even they feel superficial and weightless.
If that’s not
enough, Dolittle decides to take its poster’s
tagline “he’s just not the people person” all too literally by sapping the
heart of the central human relationship between Dolittle and his young assistant
Tommy Stubbins. Gaghan seems caught in
between going deeper into quasi-father and son territory and just playing them
straight as master and protégé, going nowhere with any of them. If anything,
this relationship is pointless, which is also an apt description for Stubbins’
presence throughout the movie. Stubbins could have been removed from the plot
and it wouldn’t change a single thing. His character never rises above the
boy-who’s-just-along-for-the-ride trappings. A subplot involving his fractious
relationship with his father Arnall (Ralph
Ineson) is quickly discarded and as a whole, his arc strains too much
credulity, whether it’s the notion that, despite their differences, his father
wouldn’t bother looking for him or that he can be as skilled as Dolittle in
terms of animal-talking ability within only a day or two.
Billed as Robert Downey Jr.’s passion project, his
performance is sadly anything but. Downey
Jr.’s turn as Doctor John Dolittle is his career-worst, a weary and muted shadow
of the man highly regarded as the most charming, likable actor on the planet. His
crack at a Scottish-ish, Welsh-ish, Irish-ish, whatever it is, accent is
unnatural and incomprehensible, as if he’s mocking those countries. Harry Collett and Carmel Laniado, through no fault of their own, are stiff bores as
Tommy Stubbins and Lady Rose respectively, directed only to make cutesy
reaction and nothing more.
Antonio Banderas is fine, suitably eccentric as
the pirate Rassouli and Michael Sheen
exudes envy in scenery-chewing, moustache-twirling way playing Dolittle’s rival
Dr. Blair Mudfly. Jessie Buckley gives
possibly the movie’s best performance as Queen Victoria, despite being asleep
for two-thirds of it.
As far as the
voice acting goes, Rami Malek is
perhaps the only one to give his gorilla character Chee Chee a semblance of
weight, gravity and warmth that transcend the others’ one-note performances.
It’s also a treat to see Tom Holland
make a glorified cameo as the dog Jip, reuniting with MCU co-star Downey Jr.
CONCLUSION:
Dolittle is a faithful
but ultimately disappointing reimagining of Hugh Lofting’s popular children’s books, offset by a messy,
uninspired plot, cartoonish characterization, lifeless direction and an
unfortunately miscast Robert Downey Jr.
in the titular role.
Score: 4/10
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