Movie Review: Robert Downey Jr’s "Dolittle" Needs an Accent-Adjustment, Stat

No animals were harmed in the making of this movie. Just careers.

When the queen falls ill, poisoned by a Lord, who you gonna call? A vet, apparently.

That’s the premise of director Stephen Gaghan’s Dolittle, adapted from Hugh Lofting’s series of books. First published in the 1920s, they were famously made into a Rex Harrison flick in 1967, and again with Eddie Murphy some decades later, and again once more in 2020. None are good. Despite the affection many have for Lofting's prose, his character—a curious physician with an uncanny talent for communicating with his animal patients—has basically become known for being the professional nadir of anyone who takes on the role. So it goes for Robert Downey Jr.

RDJ’s Doctor Dolittle, as we meet him, is living in widowed isolation with his menagerie of animal friends, speaking solely in clicks and grunts (handily translated for viewers into modern English). The fate of his manor, however, is put in danger when Queen Victoria (Jessie Buckley) gets sick; she’s the one who gave it to him and the late Lily Dolittle, but only for the duration of her own life. He agrees to treat the Queen at her bedside—which puts her in the same company as criminals avoiding hospital emergency rooms—and, after letting his dog sniff her, deduces she’s been poisoned (unbeknownst to her, by Lord Badgley, played by Jim Broadbent). The cure can only be found on a remote island, so Dolittle and his furry friends—including a gorilla, polar bear and squirrel—take to the seas, with Badgley’s co-conspirator, Dr. Müdfly (a cheerfully cartoonish Michael Sheen), on their tails.

The film itself isn’t the catastrophe some might have assumed given the behind-the-scenes shenanigans that saw Gaghan eventually replaced with Jonathan Liebesman (although, in official terms, Liebesman just "collaborated" on reshoots). The special effects look nice, and the talking animals are cast appealingly. Kids should get a cutesy kick out of them. Its human star may prove more unsettling to the littlies, given he’s adopted an impossibly bad and often unintelligible Welsh accent; an especially bizarre choice considering there’s already a perfectly good Welshman, Sheen, right there next to him. Downey Jr. has a history of thinking he can do anything as long as he does it the most. He should have heeded the title of this movie.

Gaghan’s documented inexperience with CGI is obvious in how he's filmed Downey Jr. in extreme close-up for the duration. It reiterates that this is RDJ's picture (his wife, Susan Downey, produces), while also suggesting he exists separate to it. His animal co-stars (voiced by Rami Malek, John Cena and Kumail Nanjiani to name a few) are often simply cut to separately, to provide a jokey aside. In fact, Dolittle only really has an interactive relationship with one animal in particular: Emma Thompson’s Polynesia, a macaw he seems to have taken as his new wife.

Even with the technical hurdles in mind, Downey Jr's is not a generous performance; he constantly draws away all the attention, and squanders it with his sub-Captain Jack Sparrow antics. If anyone should know by now how to operate with an ensemble in front of a green screen, it should be the star of Avengers: Endgame.

The script—credited to Gaghan, Dan Gregor and Doug Mand—hits the expected beats, with its only surprise being a climactic colonic. The animals’ jokes are pretty tired—one actually says "that’s gotta hurt"—and are only ever sold by the performers’ endearing enthusiasm. Occasionally, the picture hits a high note, such as when Dolittle offers some Freudian therapy to a tiger, voiced by Ralph Fiennes, or when a manic dragonfly voiced by Jason Mantzoukas interrupts proceedings.

Otherwise, it’s an ordinary flick that still bears the scars of editing room surgery. Younger viewers may not notice, or care, but they may ask their parents afterwards what that scary, frenzied man in the lead was trying to do.

2.5/5

In Australian cinemas. Rated PG for mild themes and violence.