Dolittle review: It’s flat and hokey, but certainly no Cats

Dir: Stephen Gaghan. Starring: Robert Downey Jr, Antonio Banderas, Michael Sheen, Emma Thompson, Rami Malek, John Cena. PG cert, 101 mins

The inadvertently hallucinogenic, instant-cult-hit Cats gave audiences a taste for blood. Everyone was in search of the next cinema phenomenon they could sink their claws into and meme to death. And Dolittle seemed like the perfect victim. Its trailer – set to a breathy cover of “What a Wonderful World” – attempted to sell shots of waddling ducks and polar bears wearing knitted hats as the stuff of epic cinema. Then there was its star, a post-Marvel Robert Downey Jr, uttering the words “perilous journey” in an accent immediately baffling to all human ears. Was that meant to be Welsh? Scottish? Indian?

But Cats it is not. Dolittle is flatter and hokier. The eye lines between the humans and CGI animals never quite seem to match. Nor does the dialogue fit comfortably with the movement of their lips. Emma Thompson voices a parrot whose narration fills the gap between clearly missing scenes. The film was originally shot two years ago, but tested poorly with audiences and faced extensive reshoots. That caused the budget to balloon to an eyewatering $175m. Downey Jr, meanwhile, bounds into the frame while twirling his hands and guffawing – as any onscreen “eccentric” is required to do. His accent is all over the place, though not unbearable to listen to. It’s a valiant, but flawed attempt to inject outsized movie star charisma into a film already busy with A-list names (Ralph Fiennes, Octavia Spencer, Marion Cotillard and Rami Malek all voice various creatures).

Dolittle’s adventures, originally created by Hugh Lofting in his letters home from the trenches of the First World War, have been endlessly adapted for screen over the years. There’s the 1967 musical version with Rex Harrison, which faced an equally disastrous production and ended up a box office failure. The 1998 version, starring Eddie Murphy, fared better; it’s fondly remembered by a certain generation and even earned enough to spawn several sequels. This instalment is the most memorable – also the worst.

It opens on an animated prologue, revealing that Dolittle has locked himself away from the world after the death of his explorer wife (Kasia Smutniak). He’s only drawn out of his self-imposed exile after a mysterious illness strikes down Queen Victoria (Jessie Buckley, who turns in an awards-worthy performance while lying completely still and doing nothing). And so, Dolittle sets off to find a cure, travelling to the home of Antonio Banderas’s pirate king – a place heaving with Middle Eastern stereotypes.

There’s a kind of gentle whimsy present during the film’s opening scenes: Dolittle is dressed by mice and birds like he’s Cinderella, while his home is filled with Pee-wee’s Playhouse-style inventions. That tiny glimmer of magic, however, is dissipated any time anyone opens their mouths. “I bought a front-row seat to crazy town!” a squirrel (voiced by Craig Robinson) declares, while John Cena’s polar bear can’t end a sentence without the word “bro”. Then there’s the climactic moment Dolittle sticks his hand up a dragon’s backside and pulls out a set of bagpipes, only to get hit by a gust of wind that had been brewing inside the creature for centuries. This might have all felt part and parcel of your average zany animated film, but when it’s a photorealistic dragon passing gas, the whole thing starts to feel like a bloated extravagance. Dolittle ought to have... done less.