Michael Sheen is legitimately funny in his impotent blustering villainy, and the squirrel with the soul of a paranoid SEAL commando is also funny. "Dolittle" doesn't manage to hit any of those easily-hittable marks, although it tries. In 19, respectively, Eddie Murphy starred in two versions, and they were goofy and sometimes gross and kind of sweet, too.
All you can see is all that money just pouring down the drain. The 1967 musical version, starring Rex Harrison, was a legendary flop, so much so it's now seen as one of the death knells of the long overdue collapse of Hollywood's bloated studio system. The animals are mostly computer-generated, too, which adds to the feeling of unreality. Since the majority of the film is group scenes, with a lot of chattering dialogue coming from many different sources, this results in a feeling of almost total dissociation. Every voice, including Downey Jr.'s, has this strange disembodied quality, like there's a small space around it, each voice in a little separate pod. It's not clear which animal is speaking when, and it's also not clear where any given voice is coming from. "Dolittle" feels like someone tossed a bunch of random scenes into the air, let them fall onto the ground, and then tried to connect up the fragments through weirdly looped dialogue that seems to be emanating from a recording studio halfway across town. And thickens again.Ĭertain scenes are so confusingly shot, and put together so haphazardly, that watching it is, at times, like floating in a sensory-deprivation chamber, where up is down, or down is over there, and voices come at you in disorienting surround-sound. The ship stops off at an island known to be inhabited by bandits, led by Antonio Banderas, who also has a vendetta against Dolittle. The only antidote is in the blossoms off the Eden Tree, found on only one island, so he and his merry band of mammals sail off into the ocean to retrieve it, hopefully in time to save the Queen. After examining the Queen ( Jessie Buckley), Dolittle suspects she is being poisoned by her sinister ministers ( Jim Broadbent, Michael Sheen). If Dolittle doesn't help the Queen, then the land on which his manor sits will be taken away from him, and his menagerie dispersed right in the middle of hunting season. His exile is interrupted by two visitors who show up on the same day (in a sloppily handled coincidence): Tommy Stubbins ( Harry Collett) bears a wounded squirrel to Dolittle's door, and Lady Rose ( Carmel Laniado) summons Dolittle to the Palace to help save the ailing Queen Victoria. (voiced by Kumail Nanjiani, Rami Malek, Selena Gomez, Octavia Spencer, Craig Robinson). (This is shown via animated prologue, with voiceover by Emma Thompson, who plays Polynesia the parrot.) Now a hermit, with long straggly beard, Dolittle spends his days hiding from the world, chattering away with his animal friends, a duck, a polar bear, a gorilla, an ostrich, etc. At the start, Dolittle is holed up in his mansion, unable to recover from the death of his wife, lost at sea during one of her expeditions to the remote corners of the world.
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