Dolittle: a film that really needed to do more
Dolittle is a film that is decisively average but only because of audience reviews. It was slammed by critics with many concluding that it was rushed, uninspired, and nothing more than generic. There are a few that try to match the enthusiasm of the audience reviews, complementing the film as another addition to the genre of simple, family-friendly entertainment. However, after finally biting the bullet and watching it, I seem to find myself with the prior instead of the latter.
Narratively it was okay. There was nothing special or overcomplicated about the plot. Robert Downey Jr. plays the eccentric Dr. Dolittle as he outsmarts doctors, politicians, and tigers, venturing across the sea to find the fabled Eden Tree and save the life of a young Queen Victoria. It is a fun adventure, or at least it would be if it were handled better. There are a lot of characters in the film – from the humans to the animals, it is a star-studded cast. However, whilst this works for some films, it certainly didn’t work for Dolittle. I found myself forgetting the names of the animals, even after multiple watches, and not really caring much for any of the characters. Many of them despite appearing throughout the film are underutilised, making them feel pointless to the overall narrative. It definitely would have benefited from a smaller, more conscience cast. Additionally, there are three villains in the film, and yet none of them poses a real threat to Dolittle or the animals. In fact, the film lacks any sense of urgency outside of the queen’s deterioration. For example, a threat is made against the sanctuary at the beginning of the film and never mentioned again. It brings Dolittle into the plot, but it has no weight on the plot itself. The only character that has any weight and is arguably the closest thing the film has to a proper villain is Dr. Blair Müdfly (played by Martin Sheen). As ever, Sheen throws himself at the role and in my opinion outshines the film’s lead. His obsession with Dolittle is one of the funniest parts of the film and I feel that this should have been the focus of the film’s conflict rather than trying to make the conflict centred around Dolittle’s grief. It would have allowed the comedic moments to run throughout in comparison to being one notes that often fell flat.
Strangely, in a film where the focus should have been on the animals, I was longing for more attention to be placed on the connections and relations between its human cast. Though I will admit the shoddy visuals heavily contributed to my desire to see something different from this film.
I never like doing it, but here I need to compare the visuals of Dolittle to that of Disney’s The Jungle Book released in 2016. The scene that comes to mind specifically is after the council of the wolves, when Mowgli decides to leave the jungle and Rakasha, a wolf, says her farewells. The two embrace and Mowgli runs his hands through her fur, where you see the moisture from the rain wet it and his fingers move through it. It is a touching scene, made all the more heartbreaking because the CG animation is able to capture the realism of its animals. In contrast, there are points in Dolittle where the animals don’t even look like they’re on the same layer as the human actors, and at times, even the backdrops stand out this way. The movements are not always fluid and whenever the human actors interact with the CG animals, they almost hover above them. For example, when Dolittle embraces the tiger, his arm hovers above the tips of the tiger’s fur; or when Stubbins (played by Henry Collett) is riding a giraffe during the chase scene in the film’s first half, his arms look as if they’re floating around the animal’s neck rather than holding onto it. The animals themselves are well-designed and competently animated, however, whenever they interact with the real world or with the actors, things go very wrong and it feels like I’m watching a film from the early 2000s.
Sadly, this isn’t where my complaints with the animals end, as the sound mixing for some of them is also pretty bad. Lines of dialogue overlapping and voices sounding distorted. It doesn’t help that this is coupled with Robert Downey Jr.’s unusual attempts to carry a Welsh accent as it just takes away from the whole experience.
Dolittle is certainly a film that had potential but instead it tried to do too much. It had a large cast to accommodate its big names and a plot that cast a line with no hook. There are fun moments, but rather unsurprisingly not enough to forgive its faults.
