Everything About Dolittle is a Disaster

alright guys super serious film reviewer Amanda here and today we're gonna be talking about do a little but before we get into that I would just like to say that you know in my cat's review I I got a comment saying that all of it wasn't just I guess just about me but it was about me and just anybody apparently who had complained about cats at all and it was something along the lines of you people think your critics when you can even like judge what it's supposed to be based on and judged on and you're just talking about how you don't even like it so how can you even judge something that you don't like yeah I just kind of end it off with like don't think you're a real critic just because you're yelling about movies and for that I just have like one thing to say the Toronto International Film Festival would like to disagree because I've got this handy-dandy Press Pass and the the the Sundance International Film Festival like to disagree twice so I disagree I am a super serious actual film review recognized by two of the top film festivals in the world so yeah anyways let's get on to talking about Robert Downey jr. anally probing a dragon all right so what Doolittle is the beloved tale of the doctor who can talk to animals obviously in the film world we all remember the Eddie Murphy rendition of it which was quite beloved but obviously not very similar to the original story but it was beloved nonetheless and a lot of people were like pretty upset that this was happening even though everybody loves Robert Downey jr. and I just remember seeing the trailers for this and feeling like the whole thing was pointless even though on paper it sounds good you've got a beloved history of story books you've got a bunch of beloved people voicing the animals you have beloved actor Robert Downey jr. in the titular character spot of dr. Dolittle on paper it all sounds like it should work but instantly when people heard this was happening the general consensus was just what and then once the trailers actually came out it was like what so I had pretty much decided I was 100% not seeing this movie you and you ever noticed that like a of my stories start out that way is that you know I I knew that movie was gonna be bad so I decided I wasn't gonna waste my time with it but as per usual someone said I assume you're gonna be making a video about dr. Dolittle because like I heard it's really bad and I'm like no I know it's gonna be bad that's not why it that's why I'm not gonna watch it and they're like no but like it's really bad and then I my head and I'm like well how bad is it and then some people actually posited that it was worse than cats people were actually trying to make this statement that this movie could be worse than cats and I I was honestly shocked because I do not believe that anything will hit me the way that cats did and I I was right I watched this whole movie and while obviously it is not a good movie it is not cats cats is an entirely different beast of a movie that I never want to experience again cats is the kind of movie that if you got together with a group of friends got really drunk and we're watching it at home when you can like walk away or order pizza yell at the screen throw things at the screen you might be able to have a good time watching it but when you're just actually comparing it bare-bones movie to movie which one would I rather just sit and watch Doolittle takes this by a landslide but again that's not to say that this is a good movie obviously there was a lot of stuff that went on the back end in the production aspect of this movie there were tons of reshoots and we're gonna get into some of that drama and some of that alleged drama in a little bit but first I'll just kind of talk about the movie itself and how I feel about it now like I mentioned it's nowhere near as bad as I think some people are saying it is I think if you have kids under the age of you know eight maybe even eight you'd probably be fine they'll probably be a couple chuckles I did watch it once again you guys got me into a theater for a movie that's for kids at 11:45 in the morning a notepad just like scribbling my notes like a serious movie reviewer it's a big mess of a movie in that it tries to give you the the impression that it's gonna be maybe some kind of like swashbuckling adventure I feel like the trailer gave me the feeling that it might be trying to capture what that Chronicles of Narnia voyage of the Dawn Treader it gave me that vibe but you don't ever get that you don't get the feeling of adventure and anytime you think something's gonna go wrong on the adventure in like a serious way related to something that it's foreshadowing like nothing ever happens no see there are bad things that happened but it doesn't feel like it goes together in a cohesive way and it feels like anytime there's adversary at one point it doesn't actually result in a problem anywheres else so in that standpoint it doesn't really stand up as like an adventure movie it's not very adventurous it kind of does something similar to the recent Star Wars movie where it's just jumping from location to location so quickly that you don't even necessarily feel like you have the time to appreciate anything that happened and that there isn't really it doesn't feel like there's stakes it's not funny enough to really come across as a comedy they do try to throw in some jokes that only parents would get but it's it's weird like at one point there's a rush hour joke and then my personal favorite was like an entire Godfather scene between ants and a dragonfly it does try to capture a couple moments of like whimsy of where like the good doctors trying to to teach the animals new ways kind of kind of like Wizard of Oz you know like like the gorilla needs courage and these people need to stop arguing so much just stuff like that there were a couple nice moments I will give it that but overall it's just it's a very convoluted movie it's very messy there doesn't really seem to be a lot of consistency and I think a lot of that comes down to the fact that there wasn't a lot of cohesion when the movie was being made and then hearing about all those reshoots and like I said there's a bunch of like alleged stories going on around this so the general premise of this movie is that it starts off it goes through the entire you know who dr. Doolittle is what happened there and then you kind of get one of these up moments where it's like an animated intro that it goes through all of the wondrous things he's done and then his wife dies and now he's become a recluse because he can't handle the guilt that he feels for not being with his wife when that happened so he's still taking care of all the animals but he hates people and then this little kid accidentally shoots a squirrel by trying not to shoot some ducks and that's how he gets brought to so the good doctor himself and then he gets trapped and then before it can really progress past there this other girl shows up saying that she's on a mission from the Queen to get the doctor there and this is something that because it's kind of mentioned so quickly they mention it like three times but apparently some people didn't catch why why the recluse agreed to go save the Queen of England when he's an animal doctor but it's literally because if he doesn't go and the Queen dies they lose the deed to the house and the property and they'll all be kicked out so that's the only reason why he goes it's very self-serving and he even specifically makes a joke about the fact that like he should never let monkeys be as lawyers again and monkeys should not be the people in charge of contracts and I do want to talk about the animal talking a little bit so obviously when I first get to the house instead of it just being him talking animals and the animals already talking he's just kind of making all of these like like different noises like really weird noises like sometimes he's not even doing like full animal noises but he's just doing like just a bunch of different things to show these talking and and that makes me wonder that for the rest of the movie when we're hearing him talk to the animals does everybody else just see him like barking at things and this is kind of compounded later when the kid is like oh my god I think I'm starting to understand animals and he's like when the monkey goes like whoo-whoo it means this and I'd point out how much more ridiculous that is except that's pretty much what I do with my cat every single day through the way they go up to the palace they find out that oh my god she's been poison and we need to go find this this tree that's never been found before on this magical island and the only way they can find it is by getting a journal that his wife wrote which is somehow the only thing that survived the shipwreck so they have to go to the island that she called home even though everybody there hates him and like if you kind of point it out like all the little rubrics like that it seems like it could have been something that was really interesting and it's a way they forego actual filmmaking and they just tell us they like the parrot just starts like listing out plot points being like oh but he's hated on this island so they're gonna have to sneak in with disguises but then for some reason the kid who no one knows has a disguise that is so obviously a disguise like what why does the kid need a fake beard and at some points he actually like goes to the care of putting it back on I don't understand yeah I guess actually just to go back a little bit before that when he finds out that she's been poisoned that when I made the note of snitches get stitches it's that he goes underwater and starts talking to an octopus and is like oh did you see anything and you know both says snitches get stitches because that is a classic catchphrase from the 1920s and then at one point they just slip in like this one moment really quickly where someone goes to use a flyswatter fly goes through the hole in the flies party he's like oh my god I've survived this is gonna be my new lease on life what amazing things can i comp and then like the say like mid-sentence he flies out the window and a seagull come by and eats him which I thought was a really interesting commentary on the state of the animal kingdom and the harsh nature of the world they start getting hunted down by the original doctor that the Queen had because it turns out that like the whole thing is a ploy to kill the Queen because they think she's too young to rule and that's not even a spoiler because they play that card instantly like the second you're in the room with the doctor he's got the whole moustache twirled dark clothing and he's literally like she'll be dead before the week is out like very obvious right from the get-go that this is the villain they don't even try to conceal that in any way shape or form so he's off on a voyage to try to kill them like this probably could have felt like a Pirates of the Caribbean lights or Pirates of the Caribbean for like a slightly younger generation of kids because I wouldn't inherently say that Pirates of the Caribbean is inappropriate for kids but it just turns into like a dis interesting mess and then they end up finally getting to the island where they they need to get the eatin tree but of course what is protecting the eatin tree is a dragon like another interesting thing that I kind of forgot to mention is that a lot of the times it's very hard to understand what Robert Downey jr. is saying in this movie I kind of assumed he was just gonna put on the the Sherlock Holmes accent but it's some kind of like weird mumbling oftentimes incoherent accent which is really unfortunate because this is like a kids movie where clarity is very important but it's like I don't know if maybe sometimes they just want to like okay man what you're gonna be saying and how he diagnoses this doesn't make any sense so you just got to kind of mumble it and then we're gonna go for the solution and when it comes to the dragon they mumble a bunch of stuff about how like like heartache and something in the intestinal system and the guts and then the the solution is anally probing the dragon with a leak yet giving the the dragon an enema with a with a vegetable sodomizing a dragon with a leek there's a lot of ways we can word this but you know it's the the gist of it is is that he shoved the leek up a dragon's ass and then just starts pulling out all of these like bones and armor the last thing he pulls out is a completely intact bagpipe the Scots made it here first and the bagpipe that is made of wood and fabric survived the inside of a dragon stomach and even if we're just talking about a regular animal the bagpipes survived through stomach acid and the intestines which honestly it should not be the area that has me stuck I'm just stuck on this entire situation this entire scene like the moment this moment in the trailer is in fact a dragon farting after a couple of items of armor have been pulled out of her [ __ ] and then the dragon is just so thankful to have been violated in this way that she takes them right over to the tree they immediately make it back super quickly everything works out they saved the Queen the bad guys get caught he reopens his Animal Hospital for business and everything's good and he's better for it and he lets the kid be his apprentice and that's the movie but if it was just the bare bones of the movie itself there were the issue it wouldn't be so fun to talk about so as I kept mentioning a few different times this kind of had a lot of production issues to the point that I had a reshooting from the guy who directed the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle movies like the new ones the TMNT while the original director Stefan Gaghan was still involved and they tried to say oh this was like an amicable process it's weird to me that they would bring in a different director to do the reshoots while still having the original director around so this particular article is actually saying that that dragon farting scene is something that was added in the rewrites and the reshoots which is obviously the area that we're all just holding on to and honestly I don't think anyone around me laughed very much in that and it was a lot of kids and I don't think very many people did but allegedly and I will say allegedly I have no way of proving if this is a real story but a little while ago on reddit I'd say back in like October of 2019 there was this entire thing that popped up by an account called a goofy face and again I don't know if this was ever corroborated because obviously I think if you figured out who this person was they would probably be fired but he kind of went through and shared a bunch of production problems with the movie and specifically with the director now I questioned some of this take in general because the guy keeps calling him Stefan even though the name spelt Stephen but it makes me wonder if this is actually real so if this had anything to do with how much of a disaster the movie was it would not surprise me so let's read some of this it was deep in production hell last year they started filming scenes before they even planned where the animated animals would be standing it was nuts and then the batshit director Witten got fired which was a little too late after his insane outbursts and subsequent banning from stepping foot into both the lead concept department and the pre visual animation department then he demanded that the pre visual department be fired because we can figure it out on the day yeah Stefan you can figure out where five plus animated characters and Robert Downey jr. are standing when you have 30 individual camera shots to film on a Monday morning then someone else responded no wonder they had to bring in the lego batman director to rewrite it and the TMNT director to helm the reshoots and the goofy face comes back with we were long gone before another writer came on board thanks to gag ins apparent hatred of all things pre-production so I can't attest to the state of things now but man if it's even remotely watchable than the new guys deserve some [ __ ] medals I will say it's remotely watchable then he'd go on again to say we attempted to talk and show the director some cinematic sense but he was literally insane almost put a fist through a new 8k TV because the talking goose wasn't on-screen while it was talking in one shot even though he asked the week before for us to move the goose out of the shot because the audience doesn't need us to hold their hand and point them to every character that's currently talking but here's the kicker we had footage of him the week before asking to remove the goose off screen it was Stefan's idea to record every meeting so that we couldn't misinterpret his instructions and then the last thing he says which is the one that kind of I think I remember back this was what a lot of people ended up focusing on mate you wouldn't believe half the [ __ ] that went on during this film's pre-production here's a tidbit that I doubt anyone will truly believe Stephane gag ins dog is one of the most incredibly regal looking mothers I've ever seen which is a shame because it's a stone-cold racist and without a doubt we'll track down every human in the building with even the slightest drop of ethnic ancestry and bark like how a scrapyard Doberman guard dog might bark at a squirrel now I can't corroborate that any of that is real but it does seem to line up with some of the issues that the production had going forward so regardless the reason Doolittle was kind of a mess whether it has more to do with the you know studio interference or the fact that it was kind of dead on arrival because of issues with the original director and while the racist dog thing sounds funny at like face value it kind of implies that he's racist so I can understand why like B we should kind of not necessarily take this at face value obviously I was just once again like to say I cannot corroborate any of those comments made on reddit but I do just think that they add an interesting history to the creation of this movie and a lot of the drama that swirled around it oh yeah definitely not cats leveled bad so you get that in your favor I guess Universal so thank you all so much for watching have a fantastic day and we'll catch you all later you

Channel: Amanda the Jedi

Views: 254,951

Rating: 4.9349952 out of 5

Keywords: dolittle, robert downey jr, rdj, rdj dolittle, stephen gaghan, reddit dolittle, reddit stories, dolittle reshoots, universal, worst movies, cats movie, dragon, dolittle dragon, 2020 movies, worst movies of 2020, john cena, emma thompson, selena gomez, plot holes, movie review, dr. dolittle, antonio banderas, tom holland, dolittle disaster, dolittle 2020 is bad

Id: hc6r62X6_OA

Length: 16min 51sec (1011 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 19 2020