There’s got to be a moment, as an actor watches himself on-screen pulling bagpipes out of a CGI dragon’s rear end, that he thinks, “Have I really fallen this far?”
Then again, we’re talking about Robert Downey Jr., whose life has featured . So maybe it’s not so unusual to see him careen from the triumphant high of “Avengers: Endgame” to the nebulous space he occupies at the center of this bizarre, sort-of kids’ movie.
The latest in a long line of adaptations of the 1920s children’s books, this “Dolittle,” set in the 19th century, stars Downey as the man who can talk to the animals, pu🅰lled out of depression-induced retirement over the death of his wife so he can find a cure for the ailing Queen Victoria (Jessie Buckley).
If you were brainstorming directors for a chipper children’s movie like this, would you come up with the director and screenwriter behind drug dramas “Syriana” and “Traffic”? Me neither, but here we are. Still, the presence of “Dolittle’s” co-writer and director Stephen Gaghan may have drawn the impressively large A-list cast, including Michael Sheen as a scenery-chewing villainous doctor (of humans), Antonio Banderas as a maniacal king and Ralph Fiennes as the voice of a neurotic tiger. Without them (plus Emma Thompson, Rami Malek, John Cena, Kumail Nanjiani, Octavia Spencer, Tom Holland and more as various creatures), I’m not sure this uneven hash of a movie would ever have seen the light of day.
But then we’d never have had the — pleasure? yes, in a way — of seeing Downey try on a Welsh accent in his version of John Doolittle, bed-headed, animal-hoar💃din𝔍g genius. He’s part Downey’s Sherlock Holmes, part Jack Sparrow.
With the help of a young protégé, the hunting-hating Tommy Stubbins (Harry Collett), Dolittle goes on a choppily edited adventure to find an exotic tree with healing properties. None of it makes a ton of sense, but there are some goofy puns and a parade of handsomely animated animals. Their shtick may largely appeal to grown-ups, though: an ant who channels “The Godfather,” a polar bear who laments that his dad “went out for a pack of seals one day and never came back.”
Heck, between this and “Cats,” maybe Universal is now just specializing in confounding talking-animal movies. At least this one leaves you feeling kindly toward other species, rather than freaked out by them.