Dolittle: A Frustrating Festival of Cacophony and Annoying Noise (Not The Merzbow Kind)
On paper, Dolittle sounds like a dream. With a star-studded cast of A-Listers including Robert Downey Jr., Rami Malek, Ralph Fiennes, Antonio Banderas (fresh off Pain & Glory), Marion Cotillard, Tom Holland (RDJ’s protégé how bout dat), John Cena, Kumail Nanjiani, Emma Thompson, Jessie Buckley, Craig Robinson, written and directed by Stephen Gaghan, shot by Guillermo Navarro, scored by Danny Elfman and costume-designed by Jenny Beavan. All of these people that I just named are top, well-known people that can make this reinterpretation of Dr. John Dolittle feel fresh and exciting. Yet, production problems and the apparent arrogance of Stephen Gaghan led to Universal demanding reshoots and hired Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2014)’s director Jonathan Liebesman to helm the reshoots and Chris McKay to write additional material make Dolittle the most frustrating film I’ve seen in quite some time and the first truly AWFUL film of 2020.
The film tells the relatively simple story of John Dolittle (Robert Downey Jr. doing his best impression of Thomas Wake from The Lighthouse and Tommy Wiseau) tasked to find “The Fruit of the Eden Tree” that will cure the Queen of England (Jessie Buckley) who was poisoned and will die in 7 days. Dolittle, his new “apprentice”,Tommy Stubbins (Harry Collett), and his merry band of annoying animals are tasked to find the tree, while being chased by Blair Müdfly (Michael Sheen) who is tasked to make sure Dolittle never returns to Buckingham Palace by the person who poisoned the Queen — Lord Thomas Badgley (Jim Broadbent).
The only that I liked in Dolittle was Craig Robinson’s Kevin, a squirrel who gets shot early on by Stubbins and has only REVENGE in mind. The only part in Dolittle that oozed creativity was the use of archival footage from war movies and nuclear bomb test footage, with16mm flicker and cigarette burns during the moment in which the squirrel’s PTSD of being shot by a pellet gun kicks in. Everytime Robinson was on screen, it seemed like he was the only actor that actually cared. His vocal performance wasn’t cringeworthy and his dialogue was quite witty. I have no idea if it was written by Gaghan or McKay, but I’m pretty sure it was McKay due to the fact that his dialogue bits are the only genuinely funny moments in Dolittle.
After sending off his most iconic character whom he will be remembered for after his death in Avengers: Endgame that single-handedly resurrected his career, Robert Downey Jr. does….whatever he’s doing as John Dolittle. It’s one of his most embarassing roles — or maybe the most embarassing role of his entire career. His deserving of an Oscar nomination for Endgame is still subject for debate, but he wholeheartedly deserves a Razzie nomination here. The first minute we see him, he imitates animal sounds (monkey, mouse, dogs, you name it) and even children might find it inherently cringeworthy. But the worst part of it all is his terrible accent — an amalgamation of Willem Dafoe’s accent from The Lighthouse and Tommy Wiseau’s. I seriously have no idea what Downey wanted to accomplish, but it’s incredibly sad to see that the movie he would do after Endgame would be this. If Downey transposed his Tony Stark charm as Dolittle and Americanized the character, I honestly wouldn’t mind it and maybe the movie would’ve worked a little bit more. The rest of the cast also give embarrasingly hilarious performances, especially Michael Sheen, who deserves an Oscar nomination for “Best Worst Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role” (instead of doing the Popular Film category, do that…makes more sense). He tries to do a maniacal villain too hard, and it’s unintentional comedy gold.
The reason why Dolittle is terrible is that the film has this weird obsession in putting a talking animal in every shot and/or a weird desire to have an animal say or do something in the background even if the film doesn’t need an overabundance of animals. Almost every shot has an animal talking or doing something “goofy” to entertain small infants, but most of the dialogue that’s [terribly] voiced by A-List actors is unnecessary to the story. Example: when Dolittle summons whales to steer clear from Michael Sheen’s ship attacking them, once the whales jump to sea, they [unnecessarily] say “Helloooooooooo!”, as if we needed to understand [yet again] that John Dolittle talks to animals. Most of the animal CGI is incredibly unfinished and feels like bad 3DS/Wii-esque graphics instead of convincing animals. Many of the animal shots are terrible digital zoom-ins in which the animals always have to be IN YOUR FACE, plastered on the screen with no sense of space and/or movement. They always face the audience members as if they’re trying to say “Look! Animals! Look how funny they are!”, even though their movements are flat, lifeless, and unnatural. The movie looks especially disconcertening in IMAX, with the film being presented in a 1.90:1 aspect ratio throughout. The action sequences are badly edited and unnaturally choreographed, replacing even actors with CGI bodies, like it was done in Star Wars: Episode III- Revenge of the Sith and Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, but better.
Dolittle looks like a film that came straight out of the year 2000, with its outdated script, A-List actors giving terribly embarassing performances (with the exception of Craig Robinson) and CGI that looks straight out of a 2006 game from the Wii and/or an experimental CGI film like the Star Wars prequels. It’s honestly one of the saddest and most embarassing films to witness, and I pray to God no one goes to see this horrible excuse of a film. I hope RDJ will recover (move away from Iron Man) and try to do better movies than whatever the fuck he was doing in Dolittle.
½
