One very amusing facet – at least for observers, that is — about the many screen adaptations of Hugh Lofting’s Doctor Dolittle series is how much of a struggle it is to bring a relatively simple concept to the screen. Mark Harris spends a great deal of time outlining the making of the Rex Harrison-led ’67 musical in his book Pictures at a Revolution, and the whole thing reads like a classical Hollywood farce, with a drunken Harrison antagonizing his co-stars and a variety of animal disasters occurring around every corner. Why anyone would attempt to subject themselves to the same torture in the modern era is beyond me, but Robert Downey, Jr. believed that he could. What resulted from that blend of forgetfulness and ego is Dolittle, a modern song-free update that attempted to at least, avoid the animal madness by using CGI for all its creatures. Stephen Gaghan, best known for winning an Oscar for writing Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic, felt like the wrong choice for such a whimsical project, and sure enough, he was. Dolittle is a boring and strangely exhausted film, sure to join movies like Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium in the dollar DVD bin of whatever 7-11 you go to get scratch-offs and Kools.
You know the basics: Dr. John Dolittle (Downey) can talk with the animals, but you might not know that, after the death of his wife years earlier, he’s become a recluse, hiding in his country estate gifted to him by a thankful Queen Victoria (Jessie Buckley), playing with his friends and former patients. One day, a gentle boy named Tommy (Harry Collett), having accidentally shot a squirrel (Craig Robinson) while out hunting with his father, is guided by a parrot (Emma Thompson) back to Dolittle’s sanctuary. The young man watches with astonishment while the doctor removes the buckshot from the squirrel’s chest, as watching a living thing go under the knife with excitement is the kind of thing young people just can’t get enough of. He decides he wants to become the doctor’s apprentice, and Dolittle eventually relents and lets him. Anyway, one of Queen Victoria’s subjects, Lady Rose (Carmel Laniado) shows up and demands that Dolittle visit the deathly-ill young queen, where he discovers that she’s been poisoned. The doctor, his young protégé and a shitload of animals decide to embark on that “perilous journey,” in search of a mythical fruit that can cure the poisoned Victoria. Unbeknown to the crew, one of her generals (Jim Broadbent) has poisoned her, and he sends his court doctor (Michael Sheen) to kill Dolittle before he can save the queen. What follows feels like the Minimum Viable Product, with entire sequences removed and sliced about, unfinished and totally uncompelling.
What’s worse is that there seems to be a charisma-lacking hole at the heart of the film. It feels like Gagnan and Downey placed a bet at the start of production to see if the actor could make a leading role compelling without relying on any of the skills and attributes that made him a huge star: no frenetic wit, no easy-going charm, no tenderness. Instead, we’re given the actor’s bizarre take on a Welsh accent in substitute of a real performance, and the resulting work feels like Downey doing a film-length parody of an Eddie Redmayne role. All of those unfortunate enough to appear in the flesh are misused, especially Antonio Banderas, who seems to have been told to do a Nick Nolte impression for his role as a pirate king (he’s also the father of Dolittle’s dead wife, even though he’s only a mere five years older than Downey). The assembled voice cast — which is genuinely star-studded, for the most part — are not given very much to do, all things considered; concealed behind uneven and often rough effects work (Tom Holland’s character, a bespectacled dog, looks genuinely terrifying). It doesn’t help that the meatiest role, that of Chee-Chee, the cowardly gorilla, is given to the downright unrecognizable Rami Malek, who I honestly thought was Ben Whishaw for at least the first hour of the film.
That’s because Malek is really the only animal character with an arc, as everyone else is primarily used for comic relief, and no one can make this dour material particularly funny. A criticism often rightfully applied to Michael Bay films is how many unfunny comic relief characters he forces into his main characters’ circles, like in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, and Dolittle wants, it seems, to beat Bay at his own game (what can I say, I’ve had Bay on the brain this week thanks to Bad Boys). It’s all geared to elicit the most base chuckle out of your seven-year-old, a very normal assemblage of farts and burps and lame half-hearted slapstick, all of which was done so much better in the Eddie Murphy movies back in the ‘90s. Though, I will give this movie some props for forcing Iron Man himself to pull suits of armor out of a dragon’s asshole: That is one sentence I never thought I would write, and somehow it even manages to make that boring as hell.
The interesting thing about Dolittle, however, is how totally unremarkable it is: had it come out ten years ago, it might have made a little bit of money, and though it would probably still have been pummeled by some portion of the press, it would by no means be a dogpile. We are, after all, the same society that rewarded the Night at the Museum series for years and years, and the humor/awe mixture in Shawn Levy’s film is fundamentally the same, executed just as well. Perhaps it’s that a decade of decent children’s films has elevated our expectations; that now, in this enlightened age, we’re genuinely just exhausted of this kind of big-budget meaningless spectacle. Or, perhaps, we’re more given to hyperbole about just how terrible this sort of massive flop is because we’re incentivized to do so.
What I’m trying to say is that if you’re planning on seeing Dolittle this weekend because you got a taste of that good Cats shit last month and want to experience more terrible and ill-advised cinema, you’re probably just going to be very bored by the entire endeavor. It’s just regular, run-of-the-mill bad.