Oh boyo! Downey Jr’s Welsh Dolittle falters in this chaotic remake
The new Doctor Dolittle film is far from a success, but my six- and five-year-old sons quite enjoyed parts of it. The unquestionable highlight for them – me too, in truth – was a scene in which the beloved children’s literary character yanks a set of bagpipes from a dragon’s anal tract, James Herriot-style, and is almost blown clean off his feet by a blistering gale of flatulence. Reflecting on the sequence later that evening – Robert Downey Jr’s lips and cheeks flapping like a bulldog with its head protruding from a car window – I was struck by how elegantly it captured the spirit of Dolittle as a whole, in which even the simplest of filmmaking tasks are as Herculean labours thanks to a steady 50-knot blast of countervailing guff.
You might have thought Hollywood would have got the message by now, since both previous cinematic incarnations of Hugh Lofting’s linguistically gifted physician – played in 1967 by Rex Harrison and in 1998 and 2001 by Eddie Murphy – were hardly cherished. Yet this new version contains the bones of a good idea. It’s hard to fathom why Stephen Gaghan, whose best-known work has involved petrochemical scandals and drug cartels, would have wanted to direct and co-write this. But it makes perfect sense that Downey, newly shorn of his Marvel obligations, might like to try a family swashbuckler in the Pirates of the Caribbean mould. (The plot involves a round-the-world voyage to find the antidote to a deadly poison that has been slipped into a cup of tea drunk by the young Queen Victoria.)
As with Johnny Depp’s Jack Sparrow, part of the fun of a Downey performance is being aware of the fun he’s having with it – and his Dolittle, a Welsh veterinary whizz gone to seed, could have been lots of fun indeed. A big problem, though, is the Welsh part. Downey appears to be aiming for Anthony Hopkins in The Bounty. What he lands on is Rob Brydon doing Hopkins in The Trip. The chaotic cutting and framing of almost every scene suggests an enormous amount of Downey’s dialogue was re-recorded after the shoot: tellingly, the actor is rarely facing the camera while speaking. The upshot is a hero we’re never allowed to connect with.
Not that his animal companions feel much more present. Voiced by brand-name actors apparently cast at random – Octavia Spencer as a duck? – they’re all rendered in mangily unlovely CGI, and spend the film engaging in rote background slapstick.
The human characters are scarcely more convincing, though Antonio Banderas and Michael Sheen stand out by sheer dint of trying – the former as a preening pirate king, the latter as one Dr Müdfly, an old rival of Dolittle’s. That cherishably gruesome twosome aside, even the aforementioned bagpipes are obviously computergenerated, which makes you wonder what on earth Dolittle was actually pulling out of there when they originally shot the scene. One doubts it was the key to making sense of the whole enterprise. RC
Downey appears to be aiming for Hopkins, but lands on Brydon doing Hopkins in ‘The Trip’