Dear Robert Downey Jr., WHY?
Starring Robert Downey Jr., Antonio Banderas, Michael Sheen, Jim Broadbent, Emma Thompson, Rami Malek, John Cena, Kumail Nanjiani, Octavia Spencer, Tom Holland, Craig Robinson, Ralph Fiennes, Selena Gomez, Marion Cotillard and Jason Mantzoukas
PG
Adventure, Comedy
Run time: 1 hr, 41 min
Directed by Stephen Gaghan
In theaters January 17, 2020
It seems we’re leaving Cats behind in 2019 because the worst movie of 2020 may have already happened, and we’re not even three weeks in. Congratulations, Dolittle, this is quite an honor. It’s a worthy successor to the terrifying Cats film with a lot of the same elements: a stellar cast, a premise that has already been appreciated by many and animals behaving questionably. And they both are pretty impressively bad. With this being Robert Downey Jr.’s first movie he isn’t playing Iron Man in roughly six years, it’s making me wish that’s all he was still doing.
The concept is simple, and exactly what you think. Downey plays John Dolittle, a man who can talk to animals, thus making him an excellent vet and apparently explorer. We learn early on that he lost his wife after she went on an adventure and never came back, turning him into a recluse who doesn’t believe in bathing or showering and only wants animals as company. That last part I can get behind. But then, he’s requested by the queen to save her somehow? And there’s a girl who’s basically in charge of the queen but it’s never said who she is really or why? This movie manages to have too many plots and none at all at the same time. It’s almost impressive when you look at the big picture.
What isn’t impressive, however, is whatever Robert Downey Jr. is attempting to do in this movie. For an arguably solid actor who has proven to have a decent concept of accent work (two Sherlock Holmes movies in which he held his own next to actual Brit), he stumbles, trips and falls into every variety of an accent heard throughout the United Kingdom, and some others that are flat-out inexplicable. He overacts in every way and is ridiculous even when considering that the plot of the movie is ‘local man talks to animals and allows them to help perform medical procedures and crew a boat.’
Michael Sheen is all but portraying the same character he was in the Twilight series, minus the actual blood drinking part. John Cena surprisingly is a great choice for the voice of a semi-bumbling polar bear. Rami Malek’s voice is entirely unrecognizable as a gorilla with anxiety issues. Emma Thompson is still as regal as always despite only being present through the voice of a parrot named Polly. Craig Robinson’s squirrel character is baffingly keeping a verbal log of his actions that never amounts to anything. Jason Mantzoukas is the best surprise I ever could have hoped for, and you know what, just to keep it fun, I’m keeping his role a secret.
This movie is all over the place. The plot is both uneventful and dragged out. One of the best bits involves a therapy-needing tiger with mommy issues (voiced by Ralph Fiennes) who gets distracted from his goal of trying to kill Dolittle by a 19th century version of a laser pointer proving that even big cats are still just cats. But when I try to focus on the good parts of this movie, sadly the top one I can come up with is the run time. The best decision they made on this film was to make it last less than two hours. Now all I can hope for is the inevitable How Did This Get Made? podcast episode so maybe they can answer their titular question, because I definitely don’t know what it is.