The Courier & Advertiser (Fife Edition)
Parasite
(Cert PG, 101 mins)
Robert Downey Jr talks to creatures great and small but fails to communicate effectively with fellow humans – including us – in a special effects-clogged odyssey inspired by Hugh Lofting’s 1922 book The Voyages Of Doctor Dolittle.
Director Stephen Gaghan, who won an Academy Award almost 20 years ago for his adapted screenplay for the gritty thriller Traffic, searches in vain for animal magic as he shepherds a fitfully fantastical caper from the streets of Victorian London to far-flung island locales.
En route, Antonio Banderas buckles a swash as a salty seadog, who appears to have been shipwrecked from the Pirates Of The Caribbean franchise, and Michael Sheen barely registers as
Dolittle’s scheming rival, who is dismissed as a “chinless wonder” by the eponymous medic.
Downey Jr walks the same plank of intentional weirdness as Johnny Depp’s Jack Sparrow by adopting a Welsh accent, which varies in thickness from scene to scene.
Humour misses the mark with alarming frequency and a climactic comic set-piece involves the doctor forcibly unclogging a creature’s swollen bowels.
He inhales a gale-force blast of flatulence as a reward. Regrettably, it’s not the only thing that stinks.
Downey Jr doesn’t lay claim to a single laugh in 101 minutes, while Kumail Nanjiani fares slightly better as the self-loathing ostrich, who opines: “My father was right about me. He said I should have been an omelette.”
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