Dolittle (2020) is one of those movies that always seemed destined for oblivion. The Robert Downey Jr vehicle (cinema's third incarnation of the mega-talented, multilingual veterinarian who first appeared in the writings of Hugh Lofting), was released to theatres on 17th January (the traditional dump month) to tepid box office and unsympathetic reviews. There were a few articles noting the production's bloated budget ($175 million) and the reported barrage of behind-the-scenes headaches, general bemusement that all of this be in aid of such a disposal end product, a few Twitter jokes along the lines of "Tony Stark did not die for this!", and then the world promptly forgot about it in less than a week. Oh sure, it was remembered in time for the following year's Razzie nominations (of which it raked in a generous six, winning one), but I doubt that anybody was rooting terribly hard against this throwaway kiddy flick when Sia's Music was much fresher on their minds. Unlike Cats, it was not the type of bad movie that merited memetic infamy, just overall indifference. Frankly, I suspect that would have been the outcome no matter what the film's fortunes. It could have been a modest hit and all cultural memory of the thing would still have evaporated by the time of The Call of The Wild. In an alternate universe where there was no global pandemic to immediately distract us from whatever cinematic train wrecks might have gone down in our last fleeting days of normalcy, I still couldn't see this leaving much of a footprint. It seemed the textbook example of an expendable production, with no greater enthusiasm behind its being other than, "Nobody's used this IP in a while...surely something can be done with it?"
All true, but that doesn't do justice to what a wholly confounding experience Dolittle is. It's been well-documented that the film underwent extensive retooling in 2019 when test audiences weren't having much fun with director Stephen Gaghan's original presentation; an assortment of comedy writers were brought in to pepper the script with new gags, including Chris McKay, Seth Rogan, Brendan O'Brien and John Whittington, but their involvement didn't stick for various reasons. The reshoots wound up being overseen by director Jonathan Liebesman, with Downey reportedly having a lot of input with the new material. The film's troubled production permeates every last inch of the final product, which has been edited and re-edited so many times over that absolutely no one moment feels like it's flowing cogently into the next. It seems profoundly curious that the original cut's lack of humor was apparently such a major sticking point behind the scenes, because by far the biggest problem with the version we got is that it feels the obligation to be funny. If it had focussed less on the comedy and more on the adventure/discovery aspects of the story then it might have been a decent (if still ultimately rather forgettable) family feature. Instead, the plot gets put on hold every few seconds so that the animals can make anachronistic quips - quips that have been conspicuously crowbarred in after the fact and fail to gel with anything else that's going on around them. It's a too-many-cooks situation on screen as much as it was off, with none of the cluttered animal cast working in unison with one another, toward a bigger picture that's in any way cohesive. Humor ranges from the confusing (I'm not exaggerating when I say that one such gag involves a random orangutan appearing out of nowhere and doing a non-sequitur dance for no reason) to the twenty years too late (there's something despairingly old hat about inserting Godfather references into children's movies in 2020, particularly when it's that same Godfather moment we've seen parodied countless times already). Universal clearly felt that a straightforward treatment of Lofting's stories would be too old-fashioned for contemporary viewership, and desired something more akin to the rapid-fire, improvisational flow of The Lego Movie, yet the movie still feels hopelessly behind the times, a throwback to an earlier age when we might have found the idea of a bunch of talking animals doing wacky improv humor more charming in of itself. In other words, it seems to be looking to exploit the mentality that enabled the 1998 Dr. Dolittle with Eddie Murphy to be a big enough hit back in the day (despite not being all that great either).
The oddly dated nature of Dolittle stretched all the way to the
film's teaser, which revolved around Downey auditioning the cast of
animals and getting them to re-enact lines from "classic" movies (I personally am reluctant to accept Notting Hill as a classic). None of the footage therein shows up in the
film itself, yet it's an entirely accurate little snapshot of what
watching the film proper is like (but for the fact that Downey himself is not in character, so we get no preview of the Welsh accent that had critics so baffled). The whole thing feels like a relic
from the 1990s, the presence of CGI animals and quotes from a few
post-90s movies notwithstanding. It's the kind of thing which, if they
had done it with the cast of critters from the Murphy Dr. Dolittle,
I would envision critics and audiences alike going absolutely wild
over. At the time, the spectacle of seeing movie animals talk and their
mouths actually moving was still novel enough that people could be wowed
by it. More importantly, in the pre-DreamWorks era we weren't quite so
overdosed on the incongruity of seeing characters from family films
regurgitating lines from R-rated entertainment their target audience
presumably hadn't seen (if they'd had that Chris Rock-voiced guinea pig from Dolittle '98
doing that same Scarface routine, I guarantee it would have gotten a stronger reaction - by contrast, the moment in the 2009 film G-Force where the Sam Rockwell-voiced guinea pig cried out "Yippee-ki-yay, coffee maker!" elicited mainly groans). I can actually think of a more contemporary example that offered more-or-less the same premise - in the early 00s, shortly after the release of Cats & Dogs, there was some chatter about a promotional video (issued with the press kit and not actually used in promoting the film to the general public) purporting to be the "audition tape" of lead cat Mr Tinkles, in which he recreated several iconic movie moments. Those who had seen it seemed to find it hilarious, funnier than the movie itself (admittedly a low bar?). I was intrigued, but this being a little before the days of YouTube, I had few options for accessing it myself (reportedly it was included on the film's DVD release, but this wasn't a title I was inclined to buy). A few years ago, I finally took the trouble to look it up and...honestly, given the reception at the time I'd expected more than just a bunch of scatological cat puns (one article I'd read claimed that Tinkles got "increasingly irate" as the auditions went on, but...he does not). Still, while there's nothing particularly witty or inventive about the featured parodies, there is, perhaps, something about the recognition-trading that comes off as more playful than it does cynical (even if it ultimately plays as more of an in-joke between the production crew). Better than the movie itself? Possibly, but then I wasn't that keen on Cats & Dogs to begin with, so...
The puns in the Tinkles video might be corny, but they at least take coherent advantage of the fact that that the character reciting them is a cat. In the case of the Dolittle auditions teaser, I really am scratching my head in trying to suss out the logic behind the allocation of each quotation to the species in question. The only two instances in which I can vaguely comprehend the thinking behind the alignment are the gorilla and the sugar glider and the mouse and the squirrel. But what exactly is the joke in having the duck perform a one-liner from Jaws? Or throwing in a misplaced "shark", for that matter? What did the ostrich in leg warmers do that caused him so much embarrassment? He's a male ostrich, so I'm going to hazard a guess it had to do with reading one of Roberts' lines when he was supposed to read one of Grant's - but if that is the joke, then I don't think it comes across very well (Plimpton's kind of androgynous anyhow...he's got male plumage, but then a) so do the otherwise femininely-coded ostriches from Disney's Fantasia, so Hollywood doesn't have the best track record on this point and b) how much do the people who made Dolittle even care about ostrich biology anyway? If they're still pushing that tired old misconception that they bury their heads at the first sign of trouble?). And then there's the most puzzling question of them all - what on earth is going in the skit with the polar bear reading from the script for Meet The Parents, a moment so flagrantly disconcerting that Downey doesn't even have a punchline to offer? I mean, that particular Robert De Niro line sounds enormously questionable when taken out of context, not eased by the rather sensual pose the bear is assuming and the downright disturbing way it keeps licking its lips. And Downey has the nerve to berate the squirrel for not appreciating that it's a family movie? (The "No humans allowed (except one)" gag is charming enough, but the trailer immediately contradicts it in showing another human operating the clapperboard.)
I find myself asking what just about anything happening in the Dolittle teaser has to do with anything else. But then I was asking that exact question about so much of Dolittle itself. As it happens, the teaser is confusing and awkward and filled with a hunk of dead space where jokes are apparently being tossed up but just not landing...which is what makes it such perfectly dead-on promotion for the film it's representing. Make no mistake, Dolittle is a catastrophic (if basically harmless) mess of a picture, but the sheer amount of chaos to be squeamishly autopsied from the thing has, in all fairness, given me way more bang for my entertainment buck than I ever received from the aforementioned Murphy Dolittle - which, more than anything else, was just kind of banal.
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