Dolittle – 2020 – PG
When my granddaughter was four years old we went to see How to Train Your Dragon (2010) and about five minutes in she leaned over and whispered in my ear, “Nana, I think this is a boy movie.” Well, ditto to Dolittle. It’s definitely a children’s film and has everything a small fry audience, especially packed with boys, enjoys: farts, poop, burps, spit, vomit and gorilla mooning. How about this for a crowd pleaser, “Something smells wrong, and that’s coming from a guy who loves the smell of butts,” blurts Dolittle’s scruffy dog. But brace yourself for this spoiler: Dolittle diagnoses a female dragon with constipation, so to unclog her system he reaches up her rear and pulls a bunch of eclectic junk out, from human bones to a giant leek to bagpipes. Anal animation. Sigh. Can you imagine a Dr. Dolittle-themed birthday party? It puts a new spin on that childhood rite of passage “playing doctor.”
Then there’s Robert Downey Junior who stayed in character by simply playing himself. His irascible, unkempt, unappealing self. By the end of the film he’s graduated from unkempt to merely disheveled. A little of RDJ goes a long way and Dolittle is a lot! And please no Scottish brogue ever again. Fingernails across a chalkboard preferable. Stick with Ironman.
The film was shelved in 2019 and then pushed back into production, infused with millions more until it maxed out at a bloated, obscene $175 million budget. Universal execs said no más and a hot mess is what we get. Besides banal toilet humor and RDJ’s Scottish For Dummies delivery, we get dialogue so poorly dubbed that it doesn’t match the menagerie‘s mouths, bad technical post-production lip-sync, bird beak speak that looks like an amateur hour tape delay…$175 million…how does that even happen?
Dolittle lived up to it’s title, doing little for my entertainment value but then I’m old and female. For me it was like watching a 100 minute Aflac commercial. In the space of two months we inherit Cats and Dolittle as the new Hollywood standard, the metric to measure flops, fiascos and failures. The stuff of memories. Go see Dolittle just so someday we can all look back and say, “By god, we were there.”
