Formula: Doctor Dolittle - Eddie Murphy * Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
Dolittle is
the latest movie to go into its release as a financial failure. Who let this
movie cost $175 million? There is virtually no scenario in which it could
recoup those costs. Robert Downey Jr.'s box office drawing ability has been
wildly overestimated by the fact that he's almost exclusively made Marvel
movies for the last decade. Live-action movies targeted specifically at children
don't make that much money. The 90s had a good run of them because they kept
the costs low. In recent years though, studios don't make money playing down to
kids. The greatest success is expecting kids to rise to a higher level: hence
the success of the PG-13 movie. There's barely even any recent examples of
movies based on Public Domain stories working. The Lone Ranger, The
Nutcracker and the Four Realms, King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, Robin
Hood. Saving money on the character rights isn't a reliable way to stay out
of the red. I really can't believe that someone let this movie get made with
this budget.
And it's bad.
Like, really bad.
The general story sounds like a good idea. Dr.
Dolittle (Robert Downey Jr.) is a doctor with the ability to talk to animals,
living in - I'm gonna say - the late 1800s. After the death of his wife, he
goes into seclusion on his estate, given to him by the Queen of England (Jesse
Buckley). One day, a boy (Harry Collett) stumbles onto his estate with an
injured squirrel at the same time that a little girl (Carmel Laniado) shows up
with a message that the Queen is sick and needs him. Doolittle takes his band
of animals voiced by a bunch of actors you'll recognize to Buckingham Palace.
He determines that the queen has been poisoned and the cure is on a mythical
remote island. So, he sets off on a voyage to get the cure before it's too
late.
It's hard for me to explain all the ways that the
story-telling in this movie is bad. I'm just going to rant some examples for a
while. So, the boy who shows up at Dolittle's door. One second he's hunting
(against his will) and accidentally shoots a squirrel. Then, he just shows up
at Dolittle's estate. It's not clear how. The boy doesn't seem to be aware of
who Dolittle is. It's kind of like it you broke your shoe, then the first
house you pass belongs to a cobbler. Let's not even get into the fact that
Dolittle essentially kidnaps the boy later on. Dolittle has been in isolation
for years, then on the same day, this boy and the girl (a princess, we learn) both
show up and get let in with little resistance. He gets brought out of his
seclusion shockingly easily. To say that the plot, not the characters, was
driving the story would be an understatement. The part at the castle is mostly
forgettable. Just more plot moving things forward with familiar adventure movie
quest-creation. It turns out that the cure Doolittle is looking for is the
exact thing that his wife was searching for before she died at sea. And, her
notes on this aren't sitting at their home or lost at sea. Nope. For some
reason, her father (Antonio Banderas), the king of his own fictional island
nation, has her journal in a secure dungeon. When Doolittle, the boy, and the
animals go to get the journal, it's montaged as sloppily as I've ever seen. It's
clear that either 1) the movie was already running over budget and they cut out
that entire action sequence or 2) someone said the movie was already running
way too long and cut this down to the bare bones. Oh, and later on, there's a
constipated dragon. Seriously, I can't capture how little sense the story
mechanics make.
The ability to talk to animals doesn't really track
either. By that, I'm not complaining that people can't really talk to animals
in real life. I'm saying that the rules don't really track. The movie has a lot
of fun showing that when Dolittle talks to animals, he actually makes the same
sounds as the animals. But, then it has all the animals able to talk to each
other. So, does that mean the ostrich makes polar bear sounds or the polar bear
makes ostrich sounds? That is unclear. Dolittle's ability to talk to animals
is introduced like a magical skill, not something that he developed over years.
However, the boy (I'm refusing to look up his name) starts to learn how to talk
to animals by the end. This opens a Pandora's box of questions that no one in
the movie is prepared to answer, so I won't even begin to ask.
The humor is where I'm most certain that the primary
focus of the movie was children. People tend to think of "children's movies"
and "family movies" as interchangeable. They aren't though, and you
see that in the humor. Watch any Pixar movie. Those are filled with jokes that
kids don't get. On the other hand, children's movies are only concerned with
making kids laugh. You tend to notice more fart jokes in those movies.
Non-clever wordplay too. I had trouble even mustering polite chuckles
throughout this movie, and I'm a very polite chuckler.
I hope it's clear that I'm not someone looking to
add to a pile-on. I tend to like a lot of these production cost flops. Tomorrowland
is one of my favorite movies. John Carter deserves a better reputation
than it has. Without Waterworld, there would be no Waterworld Stunt Show
at Universal Hollywood Studios, and that's a world I wouldn't want to live in.
I also appreciate that it's incredibly hard to make any movie. A giant
production like Dolittle is daunting at every stage. I'm only reacting
to the final product though, and this final product was really, really rough. Dolittle
is a bad movie on a technical, story, and performance level (RDJ really phones
it in). I'll leave a little wiggle room and say that maybe kids would like it,
but there's nothing here for an adult to latch onto.
Verdict: Strongly Don't Recommend
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