Godly Dragon Reviews: Dolittle

Doctor Dolittle is an interesting character. It started out as a series of novels about a doctor that could talk to animals. Then in 1967, it was adapted into a two and a half hour musical film starring Rex Harrison. It was an okay film. It just existed, was a nice and charming film. Then in 1998, there was a comedy movie of the character starring Eddie Murphy as Dr. Dolittle, which also got a sequel. That one is not so great and I wasn't a fan. Then last January, we got another movie based on the Dr. Dolittle character, simply called Dolittle. When this movie came out, I almost went to see it until I heard that it got really bad reviews from critics, and that some reviewers on YouTube were saying that it was Cats-level bad. So for a couple of months I was deterred from seeing it, until I realized that many other films that I really enjoy got bad reviews too and that some of the audience reviews on Rotten Tomatoes and Imdb were actually pretty positive, saying it was a good kids movie and all that. So, I decided to go out of my way to a theater that was still playing it, to see the movie for myself. And now that I have, what did I think?

Well, to be honest, I liked it. Of all the Dolittle films that have been made, this one is my favorite. You see, you can't really compare this to Cats because the Cats movie was a horrible movie made from a source material that was actually good, and the designs just looked ugly. Dr. Dolittle on the other hand was never ruined. It was always just a thing that existed. It does not look as ugly as Cats. I'm saying that right now. It was made on a big budget, and I thought there was a lot of effort put into the environments and the CGI of the animal characters. There were also some pretty big name actors in this movie like Emma Stone, John Cena, Tom Holland, Antonio Banderas, Will Arnett, and of course Robert Downey Jr as Dr. Dolittle. I actually thought Robert Downey Jr did a good job with what he had to work with.

This film is different from the Dolittle movies before it in that it's a Pirates of the Caribbean type of adventure movie, but for kids. In fact what I liked the most about the film were the animal characters. It brought me back to how much I loved animals when I was younger. I think my favorite animal in the movie was probably the Ostrich. He was just so entertaining to me and the animal I remember the most. I also really liked the parrot as well. I guess I've come to really appreciate birds. I also really liked the polar bear, and I like the gorilla that was learning how to face fear and be brave. There were some good messages in this film about getting over loss of a loved one and facing fear, which you don't see in a lot of movies today. I thought it was a better written film than Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. Yep, I said it. I hate that Star Wars movie so much that it's a new low standard for everything.

That being said, I will give one criticism to this movie, and that's the climatic scene with the dragon. At first the dragon is very hostile and it attacks the main characters because she has been defending the tree ever since her husband passed away too. But then she collapses due to internal pain, and let's just say that Dr. Dolittle had to do something gross to make her feel better. The whole sequence was basically just one big unnecessary fart joke for the kids. I am glad that in the end the dragon was happy and that she was alright, but I would have written the dragon scene differently. I would have wanted it to be about the pain of losing her husband than having it just be a fart joke. There's just too much of that kind of crude humor in kids movies today.

Now, with all that said and done, I do not think this is a terrible movie. You could argue that it's an okay movie, but not terrible. As for me, I thought it was a good fun family adventure movie. Nothing more, nothing less. I really enjoyed it and there wasn't a single scene I didn't like, except for the scene with the dragon farting. That scene can go die. But besides that, it's one of the better movies out there coming to what is coming out today. It's not the greatest film in the world, but it's still a gem in its own right. Give this movie a chance and see if you like it. If you don't like it, then at least you did watch it first instead of going off of what critics said about the movie. God bless!

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