'Dolittle' Review—A Disjointed Mess

Who on Earth would have thought a movie named Dolittle would do so...little?

Robert Downey Jr.'s post-Marvel career kicks off with Dolittle, a family adventure comedy where he steps into the shoes of Doctor John Dolittle, a veterinarian who talks to animals and goes on an adventure to receive a cure that may save the Queen of England.

Yes, you read that correctly. This utterly absurd movie comes to us from Academy Award-winning writer Stephen Gaghan, who co-wrote and directed this film for reasons I will never understand.

How do I even begin to describe this film? Okay, what do you get when you take an A-list actor and a talented director and throw them onto the set of a movie with an awful screenplay and CGI that is way beneath a whopping $175 million budget?

In short, you get this disjointed mess of a film.

The film opens with some animated exposition accompanied by narration. In this sequence, we discover that Dolittle's wife died at sea years before the main events of the film, causing him to be a hermit who has shut out the rest of the world, as he feels responsible for his wife's death.

Right off the bat, this subplot is way too dark and out of place for a family film. And given the content of the rest of the film, this subplot is unnecessary to the overall story.

And the overall story is nothing to write home about either. This movie may be the dullest, most generic family film I've seen in my entire career. The story is a typical, standard adventure, as we have Dolittle, a little boy, and a bunch of talking animals going on a big trip to attain something.

There is not a single memorable scene in the entire adventure; every single one of them is bland, and many of them don't feel as if they're moving the story forward.

As per usual with our family adventure film, we have our bad guys who are trying to stop the heroes. Is this villain memorable at all? Hell no. He's so much of an underdeveloped, boring, mustache-twirling villain that he literally has a mustache that he twirls.

Now, if the multiple villains of a film are disposable and forgettable, then the heroes should be interesting enough to compensate for them.

Unfortunately, this is not the case, as our two human characters—Dr. Dolittle and his child apprentice, Tommy Stubbins—have nothing particularly interesting in terms of where their characters go.

The audience never gets the chance to see how Dolittle and Tommy change as a result of their journey. The writers gave these two characters conflicts and backstories, but the end of the film doesn't adequately resolve them.

As mentioned earlier, Dolittle feels responsible for his wife's death and has become a hermit, broken over this tragedy. The film has an idea where the adventure is how he comes to terms with his wife's death, but the actual story doesn't relate to his wife's story at all.

His journey doesn't mean anything to him; it's not personal at all. Dolittle is only embarking on this journey because he has to in order to save the Queen, who he has little to no relationship with; if the two had a more personal connection, the story would have been much more emotional.

Because of this, the conflict is uninteresting, and Dolittle does not have a character arc. What the writers attempted to do with his character was done much better by Christopher Nolan in Inception.

What about Tommy Stubbins, the apprentice for Dolittle? He has a conflict where his father is a hunter, but Tommy has more compassion for animals. But his character's personality is uninteresting; he doesn't have any funny or sad lines at all.

And by the end of the movie, his conflict remains unresolved. Tommy goes back to his father, and their differences are never sorted out. He doesn't change, nor does he change anyone else because of the journey.

The relationship between Dolittle and Tommy is quite dull as well—Dolittle doesn't have a son, and Tommy has a father who's very different from him. Their conflicts create the perfect opportunity to have Dolittle be a surrogate father, and Tommy be a surrogate son, but their relationship is mostly unexplored.

Dolittle and Tommy learn very little about each other, and they end up seeming more like acquaintances or co-workers than actual friends.

But if we have uninteresting villains and uninteresting heroes, shouldn't the fun talking animals be interesting too?

No. Not with this movie, at least. All I remember about the animals is the fact that John Cena voices a friendly polar bear. Besides that, there are so many animals that you don't become attached to any of them. Their dialogue is bland, and their personalities aren't unique either.

However, the voice performances are excellent. They have fun with their roles, and they generally do a great job with one exception and trust me when I say I didn't want to say this.

I love Robert Downey Jr.; he's very charismatic and entertaining as Tony Stark, but his accent and voice in the film were very distracting and artificial. He and the rest of the cast have very little to work with, but Downey, in particular, could have done a better job.

When I say the cast has little to work with, I'm not just talking about the story; I'm talking about the comedy, or should I say, the "comedy."

Coming from someone who laughed a lot while watching Like a Boss, that tells you everything you should know about how easy it is to make me laugh. And yet, I chuckled once during this whole film.

The comedy in this movie is exceptionally low-brow. There are so many attempts at humor that left my entire theater dead silent. There's even a scene where a dragon farts directly in Dolittle's face; a fart joke is the easiest joke to make.

FART. See? I just made a child somewhere on the planet laugh.

And yet, Dolittle digs his hand around a dragon's butthole, pulls out a set of bagpipes (I'm serious), and we get this One Perfect Shot of Dolittle getting blown back by a humungous, unforgiving fart, not even the children in the theater laughed.

But there must be something. Some redeemable quality that this movie has that can stop this movie from being a total misfire. Like the CGI?

No. This film is very CGI-heavy, but many of the effects are unconvincing. Most of the shots with animals don't look real, including a scene near the beginning with butterflies that look ripped out of an animated film.

The film's action sequences have a very artificial look as well, due to the overreliance on green screen, and the fact that everything, from the backdrops to the choreography, looks very cartoonish removes the tension from these sequences.

I am in shock that this movie cost $175 million to make, but quite frankly, I have never been this sure that a film will not be making that money back at the box office.

One of the reasons the film cost so much money was due to its troubled production; following poor test screenings, Universal decided the film needed more laughs and CGI animals, so this led to numerous reshoots, added crew members, a delayed release, and the farting dragon.

The fact that this film began as one movie and had so many reshoots that it became something else is what contributed to how messy this movie is with its CGI and tone.

For example, there are scenes where it sounds like animals are about to curse, but they get cut off because it's a PG movie now. Furthermore, there are references to other adored children's films, like The Godfather and Rush Hour.

You know, just in case your children watched The Godfather and Rush Hour, and they can understand the reference because this movie definitely wasn't supposed to be made for adults to enjoy.

So much of this film is hopelessly muddled to the point where you can get the feeling that it was initially PG-13, but was made more childish to appeal to younger audiences.

How do I describe this film? Well, there's a scene where a dragonfly says, "we're bad boys," and that just reminded me of the other movie that came out this weekend that I'd much rather have watched than this film.

Overall, this is an unfunny, dull adventure film with some undeveloped characters, subpar CGI, and it has no idea of its demographic.

Final Score: Dolittle — 3/10 (D)

D for Dolittle. Trust me when I say that this movie is not good. Young children may enjoy this movie, but if you want to take your kids to see a good movie, take them to see Frozen II or Spies In Disguise.

If you're an adult, don't watch this on your own; you probably won't enjoy it, so I'd say you should see a better movie like the rereleased Best Picture nominees or something.

Unfortunately, at the end of the day, Dolittle does little.