Actors sink in ‘Dolittle’ shipwreck
Dolittle Rated: PG for some action, rude humor and brief language. Running time: 106 minutes. 6⏩⁄2 out of 4
So, after two modern-day Eddie Murphy versions around the turn of the millennium, Robert Downey Jr. has brought Dr. Dolittle, the eccentric fellow who can talk to animals in their own language, back into the 19th century, as were the original stories by Hugh Lofting and the 1968 screen version that starred Rex Harrison.
Except that the computer animated animals in Stephen Gaghan’s shipwreck of a movie didn’t get the message. The voice cast of Emma Thompson, Rami Malek, Octavia Spencer, Tom Holland, John Cena, Marion Cotillard and Ralph Fiennes has been reduced to lowest-common-denominator jokes and modern colloquialisms that make them sound like millennials at 4:20.
“I got your back, Doc!”
“It’s showtime!”
“Don’t worry guys, I got this!” Downey is properly eccentric in the title role, pretty much how he played Sherlock Homes but going even more over-the-top. It’s essentially an animated film, fronted by a live action Downey and Michael Sheen’s one-note villain. Only Antonio Banderas, in a small role, truly seems to be having a great time.
Young children might find the film entertaining, as they have been spoon-fed the bland animated characters of Pixar, DreamWorks, et al. Adults will tire of it quickly.
The plot: Dr. Dolittle has this amazing ability to talk to animals in their own voices. After his wife dies, he lives with several of them in a Howard Hughes-like isolation inside his mansion. There’s a parrot, a dog, a gorilla, an ostrich and so on, who interact in concert with Dolittle. He plays chess with them; they assist him when he surgically repairs a wounded squirrel.
(Question: We know Dolittle can communicate perfectly with all kinds of animals, even insects. But left unsaid is that for all these different types of animals to work together, wouldn’t each of them have to know all the other species’ language too?)
Two children come into his life — one a boy who appears to have some animal-communicating instincts as well, and a girl who requires his services to save the Queen of England (presumably, a young Victoria). Dolittle diagnoses that the queen has been poisoned, and that the only known antidote is the fruit from a oneof-a-kind tree on a legendary island that no one has been to.
(Question: If there is only one tree like it that no one has seen, on an island that no one has been to, how do we know that this specific tree contains the exact antidote to this exact poison?)
So Dolittle and crew set sail to get that antidote that is apparently halfway around the world. Thus, the poison which is deadly without an antidote, apparently takes months for the body to ingest. Uh huh.
OK, I promise I’ll stop applying logic to “Dolittle.” I swear. I will add, though, that if the idea was to make the film some kind of delightfully bizarre, loopy trip, perhaps Gaghan, the screenwriter of “Traffic” and “Syriana,” was not the best choice. This seems right up the alley of Downey. (And anyone who has seen “Putney Swope” knows he can do voices as well.)
One last rant: I continue to be at a loss to explain why it’s so vital to get A-list talent as voices in animated films. It’s obviously for name value that might attract box-office appeal — name-on-theposter sort of thing, but does it really do that?
It’s not that they’re bad. Not at all. But their work is often recognizable. On nearly every animated film I’ve seen, I will read the credits afterward and be stunned by the talent that I didn’t recognize. I didn’t know, for example, that Cotillard or Fiennes were even in the film until the credits.
Why stifle the very personalities that made them stars in the first place?
Given that, Thompson’s parrot, Poly, comes off best, effectively functioning as Dolittle’s conscience.
I did laugh once, when Cena’s polar bear Yoshi explained the source of some deep-seated feeling: “My dad said he was going out for a pack of seals one night and he never came back.”