Dolittle Movie

The Voyage of Doctor Dolittle (Universal Pictures)

Set Robert Downey Jr. in the middle of a bunch of animals, add a dose of humor and a golden combination has been created! I suppose that might have been a thought from the makers of The Voyage of Doctor Dolittle. Smart move because Downey Jr. has a huge fan base and a real fan (like me) shall not skip one of his movies! Do you say Dr. Dolittle, then images of the humorous Eddy Murphy, who has played the role in quite some films, are coming in right away. Now it's up to Robert Downey Jr. to portray the role of Dolittle, the doctor who’s able to communicate with animals. Of course Robert is best known as Tony Stark / Iron Man, a role that in my opinion truly was made for him! But also as detective Sherlock Holmes, he proved that he can be called an actor with the capital letter A. 

In Dolittle, the Avengers actor brings along one of his Marvel colleagues: Tom Holland, the current Spiderman from the MCU. As Jip the dog, he dropped four legs. (Because spiders have 8 legs, I know bad joke..) Bohemian Rhapsody actor Rami Malek also has a role in this film, namely Gorilla Chee-Chee. The female roles in this film are portrayed by (among others) Emma Thompson and Selena Gomez.

If you are following Robert Downey Jr. on social media, you probably have seen some of the promotion that he did for Dolittle. Around the 10th of December, he shared a humorous video in which the animals supposedly did an audition. (Several existing films included, shall add the video below). One thing was Barry the tiger (Ralph Fiennes) roaring like a dinosaur from Jurassic Park. A little later he says: "Put me in the movie or it's Downey for dessert .." I saw that in the morning, so I didn’t wanted a dessert, but it did made me look forward in seeing the film even more!

Also, from the first second, the trailer took me to the adventurous and somewhat fairy-tale world of Dolittle. The film was produced by the makers of Disney's Alice in Wonderland & Maleficent and you can certainly see that in it. Dolittle is set in the Victorian era and based on the equally named children's book series (the first one now is a 100 years old). Eddy Murphy’s version was compared to the books and earlier films quite different in details such as time, story and characters. Dr. John Dolittle, portrayed by Downey Jr. with some traits of characters that can be found on the IMDb list from Johnny Depp, prefers only animals around him. Due a serious illness of the young Queen Victoria, the eccentric doctor is needed, urgent. Together with his faithful parrot Poly and a student (Harry Collett), he’s going on quite the adventurous quest to find an extremely rare medicine for the queen. The rest of the crew includes a polar bear and an ostrich who are constantly arguing, a squirrel with sinister plans and a silly duck. Compared to Dolittle’s animal chaos, Tony Stark was lucky with just one talking raccoon!

Dolittle is a film for the whole family. (Although Dolittle takes his pet gang everywhere, I don’t think the employees at the cinema will appreciate it if you bring your own pets to the film..) Not just among children, but also among grown-ups, animal films are still hugely popular. And obviously the dose of animals and humor are all well present in Dolittle! 

 And no, I’m not Robert Downey Jr. tired yet. Hell no! I’m happy that we will at least see him one more time as Tony Stark in the Black Widow movie & that there’s a Sherlock Holmes film scheduled for 2021!

Have you seen Dolittle? What did you think of it? Feel free to share it in the comments!