Anna Daniels
To simply call the majority of Dolittle’s reviews “negative” wouldn’t be doing them justice; they’re blistering, with absolutely majestic levels of snark. Take this missive from the poison pen of Alonso Duralde of The Wrap: “[Dolittle] plats onto the screen like horse dung, with few laughs and no charm… [it] doesn’t have a fraction of the verve of the similarly misguided Cats, but it does share with that movie a staggering amount of ‘What were they thinking?’ decisions.”
Or this, from Variety‘s Courtney Howard: “[Dolittle] proves to be as predictable as it is obnoxious… What should have been an awe-filled adventure quickly curdles into an awful one, thanks to a pedestrian formula and the filmmakers’ fixation on fart jokes.”
Other reviewers were a bit more thoughtful, if no less harsh. “Dolittle is the result of the kind of taxidermy that gave us jackalopes,” wrote Karen Han of Polygon. “Huge chunks of the animal are missing, and other bits and pieces have been superimposed in a way that doesn’t make sense. But there’s one key difference between Dolittle and bad taxidermy: At least bad taxidermy is memorable.”
Even those critics not quite so inclined to rake the flick over the coals expressed a kind of melancholy disappointment in it that, in a way, is almost worse. (“Dolittle isn’t a terrible movie, it’s just not an impressive one. It doesn’t feel like a waste of time, but perhaps only because it doesn’t ask too much,” wrote CinemaBlend‘s Dirk Libbey.) Perhaps the most wicked skewering, though, came from the man most qualified to carry on the legacy of legendary Burnmaster Roger Ebert: his former partner, the Chicago Sun-Times‘ Richard Roeper. “If I could talk to the animals,” wrote Roeper, “I’d say one thing: Please make it stop.”
Written by: Looper
