After the blockbuster success of 1996’s The Nutty Professor, Eddie Murphy was once again the biggest name in comedy, a title he’d enjoyed throughout the 1980s, but not so much during the first half of the 1990s. To capitalize on The Nutty Professor’s success, one of the first projects Eddie Murphy did next was Dr. Dolittle, a movie that’s definitely worth checking out before it leaves Netflix on January 31 (and, if you’ve got time after that, it’s sequel, Dr. Dolittle 2, also has its moments).
Dr. Dolittle was created in the 1920s by English author Hugh Lofting, who wrote a whole series of books on the character, an English doctor who could speak to animals. The source material is appealing enough to have been adapted several times to film, including a 1960s version starring Rex Harrison and a poorly received 2020 take starring Robert Downey Jr. However, Eddie Murphy’s 1998 film still had the most staying power.
Murphy’s Dr. Dolittle is a workaholic physician who neglects his family thanks to his busy schedule. He soon buckles under the pressure and hits a dog while driving. Fortunately, the dog gets back up and walks away, but not before calling Dolittle a “Bonehead” in the inimitable voice of late comedian Norm Macdonald.
Dolittle soon begins hearing talking animals everywhere, an ability he possessed when he was young but had since forgotten. At first it scares the hell out of Dolittle and he thinks he’s losing his mind, but he eventually grows to embrace his gift by taking care of animals that need his help, like an owl with a twig stuck in her wing and, for the movie’s big finale, a circus tiger with a blood clot.
While Eddie Murphy’s performance as Dr. Dolittle isn’t as breathtakingly funny as Axel Foley in the the Beverly Hills Cop films, Prince Akeem in Coming to America, or all of his characters in The Nutty Professor, he is a lot of fun when he thinks he’s going crazy and when he’s lashing out at the animals for talking to him. After he embraces his powers a bit more, he mostly plays the straight man to the animals, which he’s still quite funny at, even if it does underutilize his talents.
However, Dr. Dolittle is still a top-tier Eddie Murphy film, it’s just not because of Murphy. Instead, Dr. Dolittle is great because it employs a murderers row of comedians and funny people to voice the animals.
First and foremost, Norm Macdonald plays Lucky the dog, who mysteriously reignites Dolittle’s ability to talk to animals. A good chunk of the movie is about Lucky and Dolittle forming a friendship, who also narrates the film at the beginning and end. While Norm Macdonald is a beloved comedian, much of that is because of his work on Saturday Night Live and on talk shows. Outside of the cult comedy Dirty Work, Macdonald never had a big career in film, which makes Dr. Dolittle some of his best work in the medium. His delivery gives Lucky a lot of personality and feels vastly different from the countless other taking dogs seen in film.
Beyond that, Chris Rock plays a loudmouth guinea pig, Albert Brooks plays a neurotic tiger, John Leguizamo plays a smartass rat, Gilbert Gottfried plays a ball-obsessed dog, and Garry Shandling and Julie Kavner play a pigeon couple going through marital problems. All of these voices put into the same movie elevate Dr. Dolittle from a perfectly fine comedy to a hilarious one.
Unfortunately the sequel, 2001’s Dr. Dolittle 2, doesn’t pack quite the same punch, but it’s still worth a watch mostly for two performances, one new and one returning.
Dr. Dolittle 2 picks up a few years later, and Dolittle now has a medical practice treating both animals and humans. His abilities are known around the world now, making him a highly respected public figure. That’s why he is sought out by a godfather-like beaver (Richard C. Sarafian) to save his forest from deforestation. In order to do that, Dolittle must breed the forest’s lone Pacific western bear, Ava (voiced by Lisa Kudrow), with another of her kind. The only problem is, the only Pacific western bear he can find is Archie (Steve Zahn), a circus-trained bear that was raised in captivity. So Dolittle has to teach Archie to be a bear and how to impress Ava.
The whole bear story is pretty much the movie’s throughline, and it works fine, though it’s occasionally a bit dull and predictable. Now a world-renowned figure for his abilities, Dolittle doesn’t have much of an emotional arc, so the movie just recycles the whole workaholic-neglecting-his-family thing from the first film. The sequel’s biggest problem, though, is that most of the other animals are only half as funny as the first batch of critters were.
There is, however, one exception. Michael Rapaport plays Joey, a wiseguy raccoon who serves as the God Beaver’s chief lieutenant, which is not only the funniest part of this movie, but maybe funnier than anything in the first movie too. To offer just a taste, when Dolittle suggests to the God Beaver that they stand up to the human loggers on their own, Joey replies “We can’t fight humans on our own. I mean, they got guns and knives and pull-out couches. Sure, I got rabies, I can bite somebody, but I can only do so much!”
Beyond Joey the raccoon, the best performance is, again, Norm Macdonald, who is given a funny b-story where he’s in love with a wolf that’s about double his size that he calls “Hot Lady Dog.”
Being such a big Norm Macdonald fan, and enjoying the character of Lucky so much, it almost makes me want to seek out the three — yes, three — direct-to-video sequels which followed Dr. Dolittle 2, where Murphy is absent and his daughter (Kyla Pratt) talks to animals with Lucky the dog at her side. But given how big the dropoff was between the first two films, there’s just no way those are any good. Right?
