101 min | PG | January 17, 2020 | Universal Pictures
A veterinarian who talks to animals comes out of mourning to sail across the ocean for a sick queen. Robert Downey Jr. mumbles a Welsh accent at a flatulent CGI dragon. The animals talk and almost none of them have anything to say.
John Dolittle is a Victorian doctor who understands the speech of animals and lives walled off from humanity after losing his wife. Lord Badgley arrives to report that Queen Victoria lies dying. Dolittle must sail to a mythical island for the only cure. The premise is a children’s adventure built on the simple wonder of a man who talks to beasts. Stephen Gaghan’s film buries that wonder under a barrage of noise, slapstick, and a plot that lurches from one set piece to the next without ever pausing to establish why any of it matters.
Robert Downey Jr. plays Dolittle behind a Welsh accent so muffled the dialogue blurs into mumbling. He performs the eccentricity without the warmth, and the grief that supposedly drives the character never reaches his face. Harry Collett plays Tommy Stubbins, the boy apprentice, as a blank the script keeps shoving toward the margins. Michael Sheen turns Dr. Müdfly into a cartoon villain who sneers and little else. Antonio Banderas appears as King Rassouli for a single sequence and brings more presence in ten minutes than the leads manage across the whole film. The voice cast, Rami Malek as the timid gorilla Chee-Chee among them, delivers quips that land with a thud.
Gaghan directs from a screenplay he wrote with Dan Gregor and Doug Mand, and the seams of reconstruction show in every transition. Scenes cut away before they breathe, and characters announce plot developments the editing failed to dramatize. The CGI menagerie occupies nearly every frame, yet the animals carry no weight or texture against the actors. The production design gestures at a storybook Victorian world but the camera never settles long enough to let it register. The climax stages a digital creature in physical distress and plays it for laughter the material has not earned.
The film mistakes motion for adventure and volume for fun. It assembles famous voices and a beloved premise and forgets to give either a reason to exist. The talking animals never become characters. They become a delivery system for jokes that interrupt a story too thin to interrupt. What remains is a children’s fantasy with no wonder in it, a hero who barely speaks clearly, and a world rendered in pixels that no one bothered to make anyone care about.