By As much as I’d love to give DOLITTLE the pass for just being an innocent children’s film, it’s hard to believe that the content we’re feeding our kids has become this regressive. Boasting a bewilderingly terrible performance from a fresh-out-the-gates-of-Marvel Robert Downey Jr. and a bafflingly disinterested ensemble, you have got to ask yourself who even actually wanted to make this movie. Not since I first saw THE SNOWMAN have I watched a film that so obviously cut entire narrative threads out of its edit in favor of expediting the plot. It’s a film that so fervently prioritizes the audiovisual cacophony that the kids are looking for that it leaves any semblance of character growth in the dust. It, in so many ways, just meets the bare minimum requirements of even being considered a film.
But where to start? Well, I suppose I should talk about our anthropomorphic animals first. They’re fine… really! Surprisingly, the critters, big and small, are what I take the least umbrage with. There’s clearly an absolute unit of manpower that went into the creation of these VFX monkeys, ducks, dogs, giraffes, and whathaveyous and frankly, I understand the intrinsic appeal to seeing a goose speak English. I mean, it’s stupid to pretend that this gimmickry hasn’t been commonplace in film for a hot minute now, but go off, DOLITTLE, make the kid in me smile because the goose keeps mixing up celery for stirrups (considering how much I talk about the goose, Octavia Spencer’s Dab-Dab is my animal MVP. If the goose is actually a duck, I concede that I am an idiot). Sidenote: Marion Cotillard is quite possibly the worst voice actress of all time.
Note from Thomas: We confirmed it’s a duck
But moving on, I think the more pressing concern is our live-action actors, all of whom seem to have shown up to set with the enthusiasm of renewing their license at the DMV. Suspect zero, of course, is Robert Downey Jr., who after giving up the mantle of Tony Stark, made a number of press statements that he was excited to pursue more dramatically demanding roles. DOLITTLE is not such a role. In a performance that can best be described as a lobotomized Jack Sparrow, Downey Jr.’s spin on the beloved doctor is a soft-spoken Welsh Mary Sue. The Welsh accent, of course, is not good. I don’t even really know what a Welsh accent sounds like and I can guarantee you it does not sound good. That’s how awful it is.
And yet there’s more. Antonio Banderas (hot off the heels of an Oscar nomination, no less) is smolderingly sexy in this movie and yet patently unnecessary to the film. Michael Sheen is frustratingly inept as the film’s key villain, and the two child actors, though minimally charismatic, do very little to assist the plot. And yet, I want to make it clear that none of these actors are really performing poorly. The real problem is that they serve no logical function other than to be onlookers to the cinematic extravaganza. It’s a film littered with plot developments, and completely lacking in any story beats. We move from A to B to C with the video-game logic of an Uncharted game; starting in the safe confines of Eurocentrism and venturing further and further into the “exotic”—first a pirate paradise, then a hidden island. Considering how much traveling occurs, it is actually incredible how little the characters change.
Was really hoping for more depth from Chee-Chee the Gorilla
And this all manifests in the worst way possible through the editing, much of which is noticeably rushing through the plot. You see, DOLITTLE is 101 minutes long, but I can’t shake the feeling that it was closer to 150 minutes with all of its scenes included. As such, the most baffling cuts occur in which a sad Harry Collett is awoken by a giraffe and a parrot and told to join them on the doctor’s big adventure. What should cut from this to them arriving at Downey Jr.’s frigate instead jump cuts to Collett riding the giraffe as they are inescapably being hunted down by the law. I don’t know why it’s happening, but who cares, action is fun! This logic applies to a shockingly high volume of scenes, most noticeably the fact that Michael Sheen’s antagonist is disposed of off-screen, only for the filmmakers to try and save face by giving him a post-credits sendoff, not to mention that the entire mystery surrounding Dolittle’s missing wife is left unexplored. Trust me when I say that I have no vested interest in seeing DOLITTLE again, but if a #ReleaseTheGaghanCut would start circulating on the internet, I’d be first in line to study what exactly was omitted.
And yet, when all is said and done, I guess the kids will like this well enough. That in no way means that Stephen Gaghan should continue making children’s films—for God’s sake, how did the director of SYRIANA even end up landing DOLITTLE?—but the film is so squarely forgettable that it really is kind of a case of no harm, no foul. The point is this: It’s hard to outright hate DOLITTLE. It’s not offending anybody. It’s not even really damaging the esteemed legacy of this character (who really even cares about Doctor Dolittle in the first place?). There’s no denying its ineptitudes, it’ general half-assedness, and the reductive humor—did I mention that this film climaxes with a dragon’s colonoscopy?—but hey, just because it’s not for me, doesn’t mean it’s actively awful. For what it’s worth, I’m genuinely shocked I was even able to write six paragraphs on this.
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