Dolittle rushes to her bedside only because his land, deeded as a nature preserve, will be signed off to the treasury upon the queen’s death. Stubbins wants to help save animals and Lady Rose wants Dolittle to save the young Queen Victoria (Jessie Buckley, not that you’d know), who has taken to her bed with a mysterious illness. One day, an intrepid young man, Stubbins (Harry Collett), and an annoying young girl, Lady Rose (Carmel Laniado), crash his pity party. The story finds Dolittle a hermit, shut up in his estate, grieving the loss of his wife, who disappeared on one of her adventures.
You’ll spend most of the movie wondering about the mysterious provenance of his half-Irish, half-Scottish accent and the rest of the time wondering if they actually dubbed his voice along with the rest of the animals. Everyone on screen seems to be in a stumbling daze, especially Downey as the frazzle-dazzled doctor. The only appropriate adjective for this “Dolittle” is “hasty.” Everything feels slapdash and half-rendered the plot proceeds in a fashion that could be described only as perfunctory. Except for the successful Eddie Murphy film series that borrowed the name and conceit, faithfully adapting “Dolittle” is simply a cursed endeavor.ĭo little? They could not have done less. And after getting a gander at the at-best mediocre, at-worst deeply upsetting dreck that “Dolittle” director Stephen Gaghan managed to get on screen, it’s official.
in the title role, boasting a cool $175-million budget (or maybe more?!), plus rumors of production woes and multiple reshoots. Refusing to learn from the past some five decades later, Universal is condemned to repeat it with its own “Dolittle,” starring Robert Downey Jr. “Doctor Dolittle” received terrible reviews and tanked at the box office, though Fox was able to snag a few Oscar trophies for special effects and song. Starring Rex Harrison, “Doctor Dolittle” was a notoriously doomed production, troubled by quarantined animals, Harrison’s behavior and a budget that ballooned three times its size. In 1967, 20th Century Fox undertook an expensive and complicated production of “Doctor Dolittle,” based on a series of children’s books by Hugh Lofting, about a doctor in Victorian England who talks to animals.