No easy cure for Downey Jr.’s sickly flick
Muddled menagerie of a movie is in need of a good script rewrite
Stanley Kramer’s 1961 film Judgment at Nuremberg, about the Nazi war-crimes trials, contains a fantastic effect in which the camera zooms into the face of a German-speaking character. When it pulls back out, the character is speaking English. The meaning is clear: He is still speaking German, while we the audience hear English.
Dolittle, the latest film adaptation of the 1920s children’s books by Hugh Lofting, boldly steals this technique to show John Dolittle communicating with a menagerie of computer-generated co-stars, and it’s perfect.
Alas, director and co-writer Stephen Gaghan also borrows from the 1998 Eddie Murphy film Dr. Dolittle. Specifically, the scene in which a thermometer gets lost inside a dog ’s butt, and a veterinarian has to retrieve it. Applying the bigger-is-better maxim, the new Dolittle movie chooses a much larger animal for this colonic exploration.
This scene also explains why Dolittle loses the honorific “Dr.” — there’s nothing honourable about it. You wouldn’t find Rex Harrison up to these kind of proctological monkeyshines.
I’m not even sure Murphy would again stoop so low, riding high as he is on the success of Dolemite Is My Name. The faunal polyglot in Dolittle is played by Robert Downey Jr., hiding behind a Welsh accent, perhaps in the hope that we’ll forget it’s Iron Man in this paycheque production.
And speaking of monkeyshines, the credits list Dan Gregor, Doug Mand and Thomas Shepherd as writers, but I wouldn’t be surprised if a large number of monkeys at typewriters also contributed. It’s not Shakespeare, but there aren’t enough monkeys on Earth to make Dolittle’s screenplay appealing to any but the youngest viewers. And that means the bizarre Godfather reference will fly right over their heads.
The story: Dolittle has lost his wife and fellow explorer (Kasia Smutniak in flashbacks) to an accident at sea, and subsequently shut himself up in his animal sanctuary, refusing all human contact.
Things change when young Queen Victoria (Jessie Buckley) falls ill and calls on the doctor to help. Dolittle’s dog Jip (Tom Holland) diagnoses poisoning — I had a great joke to insert here about lab work if he’d been a different breed — and so Dolittle must take to the seas in search of an antidote.
He’s joined by a stowaway/ apprentice named Tommy Stubbins (Harry Collett) and a collection of animals. They include John Cena as a polar bear, Kumail Nanjiani as an ostrich, Craig Robinson as a squirrel and Rami Malek as Chee-chee, a neurotic gorilla. Emma Thompson narrates the tale as a macaw who also speaks “human,” or what the rest of us call English. (That’s the British Empire for you.)
The humour is by turns daft and scatological. The chief villain (played by Michael Sheen) is of the cardboard-thin, moustache-twirling variety. And the arrival of Antonio Banderas — not, I hasten to add, as Puss in Boots — is downright confusing. The result, originally set to open last April, were delayed when the producers brought in Jonathan Liebesman (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles) and Chris Mckay (The Lego Batman Movie) to oversee 21 days of reshoots.
I guess that qualifies as a case of “physician, heal thyself.” But Dolittle is a sickly beast. And whatever language this film is speaking, it’s not funny.