173 - Dolittle

Your Stupid Minds ends its two-movie cyborg series and jumps in to our tried and true “Worst of the Previous Year” mainstay. 2020 didn’t have a huge number of films to choose from, but luckily the first three months of the year, where the stinkiest movies usually reside, were relatively pandemic free. In January, Universal unceremoniously dumped Dolittle into theaters with little fanfare, and the shark critics (who can talk) swarmed on its carcass.

Dr. John Dolittle (Robert Downey Jr.) is a doctor who can talk to animals. He also has a dead wife, so like all movies released in the last decade, he is stricken with grief, trauma, and depression. Lady Rose (Carmel Laniado) comes to him to say Queen Victoria (Jessie Buckley) is sick and needs his expertise of talking to animals to cure her. Also, the lifelong lease for this properly is tied to the queen’s life and not his own for some reason.

Dolittle must sail to some place to get a book to go to another place to find the fruit of the Eden Tree to save the queen. He brings along his menagerie of CGI animals with unremarkable celebrity voices, including Emma Thompson as a parrot, Rami Malek as a gorilla, Kumail Nanjiani as an ostrich, John Cena as a polar bear, and so on. There’s also a kid named Stubbins (Harry Collett as a Tom Holland type, though Holland is also in the movie voicing a dog) who tags along, and Dolittle is chased by the villain Dr. Blair Müdfly (Michael Sheen). And a whale shows up at some point. And a dragon poops out some bagpipes.