Doctor Dolittle *** (1998, Eddie Murphy, Peter Boyle, Ossie Davis) – Classic Movie Review 8752

‘What if you could have a conversation? I mean, not with a baseball or a banana – that’s ridiculous – but with your dog?’

Director Betty Thomas’s 1998 family fantasy comedy remake Doctor Dolittle stars Eddie Murphy as Doctor John Dolittle MD, a married man with a wife (Kristen Wilson) and two kids, who is in an accident with a dog (‘bonehead’) and finds he can talk to the animals, leading a whole menagerie arriving at his surgery for treatment. However, Dolittle’s colleagues think that he is the suitable case for treatment. First his clinic is the subject of a take-over bid and then a tiger becomes sick.

Murphy is on good form in this friendly, gently amusing, smash-hit comedy, with nice animatronic effects by the Jim Henson Creature Workshop, though the visual effects are pretty cheesy.

Nat Mauldin and Larry Levin’s screenplay is based on Hugh Lofting’s novels. It runs a brisk, short-seeming 85 minutes.

Also in the cast are Raven-Symoné, Ossie Davis, Oliver Platt, Peter Boyle, Richard Schiff, Jeffrey Tambor, Kyla Pratt, Steven Gilborn and Don Calfa.

It is rated PG for language and crude humour.

It is made by the same 20th Century Fox studio that had the financial failure with the original film of Doctor Dolittle back in 1967. The Production Company is Twentieth Century Fox, Davis Entertainment and Joseph M Singer. It cost an astounding $71,500,000, which must have made studio bosses nervous, but grossed $144,156,605 in the US, with a cumulative worldwide gross of $294,456,605. A sequel was inevitable.

Doctor Dolittle 2 followed in 1998.

Robert Downey Jr is starring in a big-budget live-action/ CGI hybrid film, The Voyage of Doctor Dolittle. In 2019, Universal is reworking it with a 21-day shoot directed by Jonathan Liebesman, from Wrath of the Titans and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, plus new post-production work.

© Derek Winnert 2019 Classic Movie Review 8752

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