Is Robert Downey Jr’s Dolittle the year’s most disturbing film?

The actor’s first post-Marvel project veers into Human Centipede-levels of abhorrence, writes Ed Power. Could this reboot be his lasting contribution to cinema?

Robert Downey Jr as Dr John Dolittle alongside a talking parrot voiced by Emma Thompson (Universal Pictures)

It was as Robert Downey Jr’s Doctor John Dolittle performed a colonoscopy upon a CGI dragon that my soul finally left my body.

Up and up I drifted until it seemed I was floating high above the screening room. Down below – so far away – the once (and potentially future) Tony Stark’s first post-Marvel project was cranking through the gears of existential horror. I’d already experienced one or two wobbles of cosmic dread sitting through Dolittle (opening Friday). The first came as the Oscar-nominated Ralph Fiennes turned up voicing a digitally rendered tiger – with deep psychological issues – named “Barry”. There was another flutter of almost-panic when Jason Mantzoukas buzzed in as a romantically frustrated dragonfly and the camera insisted on zooming in on his huge and disturbing insect eyes. Instantly, my bug phobia had shot into the red zone.

But nothing could prepare the unsuspecting cinemagoer for the Human Centipede-levels of abhorrence now unfolding. Downey Jr was armed with a giant leek and a Welsh lilt 10 per cent Tom Jones doing “Delilah”, 90 per cent Anthony Hopkins doing Hannibal Lecter.

The wedged veg had just disappeared from view, deployed to remove a blockage from a depressed fire-snorting lizard. The dragon was voiced by veteran actress and three-times Olivier Award winner Frances de la Tour. Back in the Seventies, when she became famous for playing Ruth Jones in the sitcom Rising Damp, she surely couldn’t have imagined that this is what her future held. For all concerned, it was turning out to be a very bad day at the orifice.

Still, as is the way with the truly disturbing, the tableau had a mesmerising quality. Perhaps this is how Game of Thrones should have concluded, suggested a stray thought. With Jon Snow applying a massive vegetable to Drogon’s bum. It would have been better than the actual ending. Especially if, as was the case here, it culminated in our hero yanking out a set of bagpipes that had become lodged within.

Did I mention that Robert Downey Jr – portraying the doctor who can converse with animals – appeared to have dubbed his voice in afterward? It sounded as if his soul wasn’t quite in his body either.

Twenty four hours later, I’m still slightly shaken. And to think how much worse it could have been. An earlier cut apparently had Downey Jr removing – and here I quote The Hollywood Reporter – “a boulder-sized stool out of the dragon”. Kids flicks have clearly moved on from ET and The Neverending Story.

The making of Dolittle is, itself, a bit of a yarn that went on forever. Downey Jr never intended it as his post-Marvel coming-out picture. It was supposed to be an extracurricular lark, in which the greatest actor of his generation had fun with sundry CGI animals.

These would be voiced by a menagerie of A-listers, who, in the final cut, include Emma Thompson as a macaw, Rami Malek as a shy gorilla, Tom Holland as a lurcher, Selena Gomez as a giraffe and Marion Cotillard as a fox. The heavy-duty cast is filled out by Michael Sheen as Dolittle’s bitter rival Blair Müdfly, Antonio Banderas as the doc’s pirate father-in-law, Jim Broadbent as a royal adviser and Jessie Buckley as Queen Victoria.

Dolittle had been pencilled in for release early last year when it would have played second fiddle to Avengers: Endgame. That was before executives at Universal Pictures sat down in front of the film and quickly concluded director Stephen Gaghan had himself produced a bit of a boulder-sized stool.

Gaghan was best known as director of 2005 Middle East thriller Syriana, an accomplished, paranoia-infused nerve-jangler but not necessarily something you’d take your kids to on a Saturday morning. The Dolittle cut he submitted was reportedly low on humour, glossing over the talking animals and instead focusing on the psychological issues afflicting Downey Jr’s character. Probably not what you want from a movie called Dolittle.

Universal’s solution was to parachute in Seth Rogen to “punch up” the script – ie write some jokes for this alleged comedy. But then he left to do something more interesting (such as not write jokes for a Robert Downey Jr vehicle about talking animals).

He was replaced by Lego Batman Movie director Chris McKay. Shortly afterwards, McKay quit the coop too, to work with Chris Pratt on science fiction epic The Tomorrow War. Apparently it is more epic even than Iron Man removing bagpipes from a dragon’s back passage.

Extensive reshoots were already underway. For this, Downey Jr was required to return for three weeks to Cumbria, Windsor Great Park in Surrey and to the Menai Suspension Bridge in northwest Wales. The new footage was overseen by Jonathan Liebesman, director of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. He had been hired at the instigation of Downey Jr, co-producing the feature with his wife Susan through their Team Downey partnership. Somewhere along the way, the title had changed too – from The Voyage of Doctor Dolittle​ to the more stripped-down Dolittle.

Still, even as the cameras rolled, issues with the script persisted. Enter McKay’s Lego Batman Movie co-writer John Whittington. He flew to London with a new screenplay for Robert Downey Jr. Yet upon touching down he discovered the actor had some ideas of his own.

Robert Downey Jr alongside Chee-Chee, voiced by Rami Malek (AP)

Downey Jr had already worked hard to put his stamp on this third retelling of Doctor Dolittle. The first, a 1967 musical starring Rex Harrison, was a notorious flop. That was followed by the 1998 Eddie Murphy comedy, which became a hit despite – possibly because of – having nothing to do with the original Hugh Lofting novels from the 1920s.

Now, Downey Jr was eager to carve out his own place in the Dolittle expanded universe. To put his own spin on the Doctor, he decided to play him as a “Welsh neo-Druidist”.

“I was just googling ‘weirdest Welsh doctor’,” he would say. “I just wanted to think of, I don’t want to just do another English accent... so there was this guy called William Price, who’s a nutty Welsh doctor, he was a neo-Druidist, he believed that he could communicate with all nature and all that stuff, so I sent [Gaghan] a picture of this wild-looking guy wearing this kind of suit with stars on it and like a staff in his hand.”

He was just getting started. Gaghan, who’d quickly proved ill-suited to the childlike subject matter, had finished the movie with a big emotional moment between Dolittle and a dragon guarding a magical grove the Doctor needs to get to. In that cut – the one immediately rejected by Universal – the two had bonded weepily over their lost loves. It was grim; not what you want from a family film.

Downey Jr had a radical suggestion for Whittington as the screenwriter arrived in London. At their first meeting, the newcomer to the production had been immediately struck by the mischievous twinkle in the actor’s eye. “I have a few ideas,” said Downey Jr. He certainly did.

What Downey Jr proposed was an ambitious overhaul of the dragon scene and with it the project’s emotional core. There was plenty of precedent for this in Hollywood. Brad Pitt had saved World War Z by re-tooling the final act completely so that it finished on a satisfyingly downbeat note. Apocalypse Now was originally intended to end in a massed pitched battle before Francis Ford Coppola performed emergency surgery on the script.

Downey Jr was about to pull a Francis Ford Coppola of his own by bunging in a set-piece in which Dolittle, and his leek, get up close and personal with the dragon. Yet however radical the, erm, insertion, it could do little do scrub away the rot already gnawing deep. Perhaps the original sin was hiring Gaghan, a skilled director who lacked the experience to shepherd a CGI romp. Whatever the reason, it was ultimately a case of Dolittle, too late.

“This is not the kind of movie he should have directed,” an insider from the production told The Hollywood Reporter. “People backed him thinking, ‘We’ll surround him with the best teams,’ but at a certain point it became clear this wasn’t working. And by then it was too late. And it was all hands on deck.”

Dolittle, unsurprisingly proved a huge flop on release in the US in late January. It has to date earned $126.6m on a budget of $175m. Critically, it has been savaged too. Downey Jr’s performance has been singled out as especially disappointing. What happened to the easy charisma that characterised his decade plus as Iron Man? (He is rumoured to be returning to the part of Tony Stark via a cameo in the forthcoming Black Widow prequel.)

“To shake off his past decade of work as the beloved Tony Stark, he has settled on a performance that can only be described as anti-charming; he’s more of a collection of tics and grunts than a human being,” groaned The Atlantic. “His Welsh accent is absurd – when it’s audible. More often than not, Downey Jr looks bored, unamused by the CGI antics swirling around him, and even less interested in whatever flimsy action he’s supposed to be driving forward.”

“The eye lines between the humans and CGI animals never quite seem to match,” says The Independent’s Clarisse Loughrey in a two-star review. “Nor does the dialogue fit comfortably with the movement of their lips. Emma Thompson voices a parrot whose narration fills the gap between clearly missing scenes.”

Universal’s ‘Cats’ also flopped at the end of last year (Universal Pictures)

And yet, perhaps it is too soon to declare Dolittle a complete disaster. As with Cats, Tom Hooper’s crime against Andrew LLoyd Webber and nature itself, there is the potential for the film to live on in ghoulish infamy. It really is too bad to believe, especially when Dolittle sticks that leek where the light of creation doesn’t shine (triggering nearly a minute of sustained dragon flatulence).

This could potentially be Downey Jr’s lasting contribution to cinema. His legacy even. It was he, after all, who fought for the enema. As an anonymous crew member told The Hollywood Reporter: “When Iron Man tells you something, you listen to Iron Man.”

Dolittle is in cinemas on Friday 7 February