Dolittle
Ten Second Reviews: Honestly one of the worst films I’ve seen in recent years and not in a good way. The film lives up to its name and does very little, if anything, well.
For a generation of kids Eddie Murphy will always be Dr Dolittle. A fun double bill, it captured the essence of the character in a fun and updated manner that makes for an easy Sunday watch with some good laughs. This version is rather different.
After becoming a shut in, the great Dr John Doolittle is called upon by the queen to help her with her illness. He sets off on a voyage to find a plant that might help her and that might exist but only grows on an island that no ones ever seen that isn’t on any maps.
There’s something to be said for a polarising film. Generally it means that it’s taken risks and I suppose there’s something base in that to admire. A polarising flick is a nuanced thing and rather difficult and delicate to accurately unpick. Fortunately this isn’t that. This is just awful.
I have a great love of one off spin off stories, but sadly this Sherlock spin off is tragic. Robert Downey Jr literally plays the version of Holmes that you imagine he brings to the first table read except he does it with an accent that really can’t decide where to settle. Is it welsh? Is it Scottish? Is it an anglo-american hybrid? Is it intentional?
Outside of the clusterfuck that is RDJs lazy performance, the rest of the acting is about as bad. Never has a cast been this rich and a film so fruitless. Not to rag on the few human characters but they are nothing short of painful to watch and yet they are far from the worst element of this film.
That accolade falls to the combination of script and CGI that render the film dizzyingly unwatchable. My understanding is that there were heavy reshoots and re-edits after disastrous test screenings. Not only is that visible from the jumping around the “story” does but also the scripting that constantly feels like there’s a scene missing that it’s calling back to. It’s feels like a film written on auto fill which, while an amazing idea for an art house piece, just comes across as thoughtless and incomprehensible.
The CGI is another problem entirely but certainly underpins the insincerity the film struggles with due to its script and acting. Since the introduction of CGI, it has been repeated ad infinitum that it simply can’t be a replacement for story. It feels like someone on the Dolittle team thought about this and went “but it can replace literally everything else!”
No set feels real; from the fields of Dolittle‘s manner to his savagely named boat, you feel as though if the live action characters walk 6 paces in any direction they’d be off any form of physical set. While the photo realism of the animals is (mostly) amazing, no animal ever feels real and this is mainly because of their movement and interactions with the humans and settings. It feels fake so it looks fake and this leads to a complete disengagement with the incredibly thin plot.
There are a host of other problems with film; from the wardrobe being confused to the plot’s movement being stunted and unencumbered by any issue the characters face. That’s not even to mention the ending or the fact that we know there’s a villain and of the 6 or 7 live action characters, only two aren’t Dolittle, his child assistants or the sick queen.
So-bad-it’s-good films are some of the best entertainment you can ask for and I don’t doubt that when they’d finished the final edit they hoped that is what this film would be (because it was certainly too late for it just to be good). What we actually got was a so-bad-it’s-annoying film which is a disappointment on every level. Don’t waste your time or money seeing this film in cinemas!