Dialed-down Downey fumbles as iconic animal doc in ailing 'Dolittle'
<h3 class="briefHead">"Dolittle" - ★ ½</h3>
Snarky Tony Stark a bore?
Impossible!
And yet, in Stephen Gaghan's feckless, CGI/live-action fantasy "Dolittle," Robert Downey Jr. wrestles with a mishmash of Scottish, Irish and Middle-Earth accents while desperately fumbling to find a properly engaging, empathetic personality for his beloved literary title character.
"Dolittle" comes from Hugh Lofting's 1920s children's books about a fantastic veterinarian with the power to communicate with patients.
Rex Harrison gave the vet a stodgy, yet avuncular, British persona in the 1967 musical bomb "Doctor Dolittle," followed by Eddie Murphy's disappointing 1998 update "Dr. Dolittle," and its more disappointing 2001 sequel.
Here, Downey's "Dolittle" does little to elevate, challenge or respect its chief target audience of children.
Instead, this frantic fantasy panders to kids with cartoonish action sequences and overwritten dialogue revealing every character's thoughts.
Then, almost as an add-on, four credited screenwriters clumsily slather a familiar moral to the story over a pedestrian ending.
Maybe we should have seen this coming.
In April, Universal Studios brought in "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" director Jonathan Liebesman to supervise 21 days of reshoots to rescue Gaghan's assembled cut, judged to be too clunky and humorless.
Clearly, it needed more.
Even with help from "Batman Lego Movie" director Chris McKay, "Dolittle" squanders multiple opportunities to maximize honest fun from its ridiculous premise.
When young Queen Victoria (Jessie Buckley) comes down with a mysterious illness, she instantly dispatches the ultra-lovely Lady Rose (Carmel Laniado) to summon the best doctor in the United Kingdom - a hermit veterinarian named John Doolittle.
For seven years, Dolittle has mourned the death of his beloved wife Lily (Kasia Smutniak), who one day decided to go off on an overseas adventure, alone, and paid the ultimate price for her display of independence.
Why? Not sure.
We first meet Dolittle as a sputtering, aging eccentric adorned with a weirdly textured beard inside his Norma Desmond-inspired mansion.
There, he and his menagerie of animals re-enact the opening to "Pee-wee's Big Adventure" with Rube Goldbergian contraptions moving to Danny Elfman's zesty score.
A Salieri-esque doctor named Blair Mudfly (a fiendishly villainous Michael Sheen) tries to undermine Dolittle, who has unfinished business with the vengeful King Rassouli (Antonio Banderas), his father-in-law.
Young British actor Harry Collett plays Tommy Stubbins, who's almost a lead character in the story, yet curiously has no function in its plot. Extract him from the cast and the film doesn't change.
Kids will appreciate an all-star cast supplying voices to an insecure gorilla (Rami Malek), a dog with eyeglasses (Tom "Spider-Man" Holland), a lanky giraffe (Selena Gomez), a narrating parrot (Emma Thompson), a vindictive squirrel (Craig Robinson) and other animals voiced by Ralph Fiennes, Octavia Spencer, John Cena, Carmen Ejogo, Marion Cotillard and Kumail Nanjiani, along with Frances De La Tour as a fire-breathing dragon given a nasty colonoscopy by a decidedly demure Downey.
It's still better than "Cats."
<b>Starring:</b> Robert Downey Jr., Emma Thompson, Rami Malek, Michael Sheen, Antonio Banderas, Tom Holland, Harry Collett
<b>Directed by:</b> Stephen Gaghan
<b>Other:</b> A Universal Pictures release. Rated PG. 101 minutes