Dolittle Review

Dolittle felt a lot like an animated kids movie, and not in a good way. The pacing, humor, and characters might as well have been drawn up by Illumination in Despicable Me 4: Let’s Go to the Zoo. Dolittle is 70% animated, anyway, featuring a cast of Minions-like computer-generated animals. The animals are by far the worst thing about the movie. They look terrible, for starters. Every time an animal jumped, it looked weightless and cheap. And the animals never shut up. They’re constantly bickering and screaming and spouting one-liners in a poor attempt to entertain you by sheer overload. What’s even more annoying is that none of the voices match the characters. This is celebrity voice casting gone amok. Selena Gomez, John Cena, and Rami Malek should have sat this one out.

This really leaves Robert Downey Jr. to carry the bulk of the movie. I love Downey as much as anyone else, but he’s not good in this. Part of the problem is that he’s doing an accent that makes it hard to understand anything he’s saying. It reminded me of Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean, where incoherent mumbling was often used in place of being genuinely quirky and eccentric. The other problem is that we don’t have any reason to care about Dolittle as a person. He’s immediately thrust into an adventure where he basically plays the conductor in a noisy orchestra. The journey takes him to some interesting places, but the challenges they face are so effortlessly overcome that there’s no tension. Instead, you get fart jokes and screaming squirrels. God, there’s so much screaming…

Reviewer

Clark
I love gaming so much, I wrote a book about it.

Published by

Clark

I love gaming so much, I wrote a book about it.