What's striking is how much of the onscreen talent won't be shown saying their lines. So much of their dialogue can be smoothly tweaked in post to punch up jokes or smooth out exposition drops, then animation created accordingly. A lot of the promoted cast (Rami Malek, John Cena, Kumail Nanjiani, Octavia Spencer, Tom Holland, Craig Robinson, and Ralph Fiennes) are voicing CG animals. Or was there some ruthless studio note that demanded the family film have an accessibly lean runtime (1 hour and 46 minutes), which led the editing team to frantically shave seconds by chopping out the middle of actions? Either possibility speaks to the disaster that Dolittle is.įurther evidence of a troubling "fix it in post" mentality can be found in the film's absurd amount of ADR (additional dialogue recording), a common tool that is criminally abused here. So, I began to wonder if the shoot went so poorly that Gaghan just didn't get the raw materials to make a cut that isn't an absolute eyesore. And it happens in sequence after sequence involving Dolittle confronting carefully crafted CGI-animals. So again and again in one shot to the next, a character jolts from point A to point B without the connective tissue of their crossing. It's as if the filmmaking team has a grudge against match-on-action cuts. We have another bizarre action sequence to barrel into! The editing here should be examined in film schools as a prime example of what not to do. Who is James? Why does Dolittle trust him on this mission? What is he even trusting him to do? No time for explanations. Characters aren't so much introduced as chucked in haphazardly, like James, a motor-mouthed dragonfly voiced by Jason Mantzoukas.
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You might well wonder if you drifted off and missed a scene here or there, like the one where Dolittle apparently escapes from a palace full of armed and furious pirates. It's genuinely jarring how the film leaps in time and location without warning or much explanation.
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Thompson's chipper voice is here for storytime, as if we're flipping the page on a picture book instead of watching a massively budgeted movie directed by the acclaimed helmer of Syriana, Stephen Gaghan.
Then Emma Thompson - as the plucky parrot Polynesia - delivers exposition dumps throughout in voiceover that does an embarrassing amount of heavy lifting. An animated opening sequence does a ton of work to set up the characters and a bruising backstory. But Dolittle is structured like it was written by a room full of monkeys lazily banging on typewriters between s***-slinging, then cut together by a blind man with broken fingers. The premise is a fine jumping-off point to unfurl spectacular set-pieces and plenty of animal shenanigans. Along the way, they'll face towering warships, a deadly dragon, and a sexy, sulking pirate played by newly minted Academy Award-nominee Antonio Banderas. So, with a menagerie of animals, the pair set off on a sea voyage in search of an undiscovered island. Desperate to save a squirrel he's reluctantly shot, Stubbins seeks out the now reclusive Doctor Dolittle (Downey), fatefully intruding as a royal mission falls into the animal lover's lap.
Loosely based on The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle, Dolittle begins not with its eponymous eccentric, but with a boy called Stubbins (a bland Harry Collett), who comes from a family of hunters but has a soft spot for animals. Dolittle is an incoherent omnishambles that is astoundingly awful. So I clung to hope that despite its flaws and checkered past, there might be something in this remake to celebrate. And in past Januarys, I've proved an earnest defender of Monster Trucks and Serenity, maligned movies that were just too damn strange to be marketed to the mainstream. To this day, I hold a sincere affection for the campy charms of the 1967 adaptation, Doctor Dolittle, which starred a jaunty Rex Harrison. As a kid, I adored Hugh Lofting's children's novels about the quirky doctor who could talk to animals.
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