Robert Downey Jr’s Dolittle debuts with 13% score on Rotten Tomatoes, critics call it ‘horse dung’

The embargo on reviews of Dolittle, the new fantasy adventure starring Robert Downey Jr, has been lifted, just two days before its slated release. And as expected in situations such as this, the reactions are overwhelmingly negative.

Based on just over 60 reviews so far, the film stands at a poor 13% score on the review aggregator, Rotten Tomatoes. The website’s consensus reads, “Dolittle may be enough to entertain very young viewers, but they deserve better than this rote adaptation’s jumbled story and stale humour.”

Katie Rife of the AV Club called the film “A confused, sweaty, zigzag approach to storytelling, which waves away inconvenient details and waves in lame jokes with an equal sense of desperation.” The New York Times’ Manohla Dargis wrote, “At some point during its troubled gestation, the movie once known as The Voyage of Doctor Dolittle was renamed Dolittle... it’s too bad that the rest of this movie couldn’t have been ditched as well, or at least dramatically shortened.”

Bilge Ebiri of Vulture wrote that “I wasn’t expecting Dolittle to be good, exactly, but I wasn’t expecting it to be quite this bad.” Meanwhile, The Wrap’s Alonso Duralde wrote that the film “Splats onto the screen like horse dung, with few laughs and no charm. Even the actor’s legendary charisma, which this project sorely needed, gets tamped down.”

Dolittle marks Downey’s first film post wrapping up his more than a decade-long run as Iron Man/Tony Stark in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The film’s production was marred with frequent reports of a mismanaged shoot, and director Stephen Gaghan underprepared and out of his depth with a budget so large.

The film features the voice acting talents of Rami Malek, Emma Thompson, John Cena, Tom Holland, Selena Gomez, Kumail Nanjiani and others.

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