The Reviews Of Robert Downey Jr.'s 'Dolittle' Are Absolutely Brutal — Here Are The Most Vicious Lines

Last year, we were graced with the presence of the magnificent disaster that was "Cats," a movie so bad that critics had a field day getting their claws out and tearing it apart. And now, just two weeks into 2020, it seems we have been rewarded with another one of these cinematic misfires with Robert Downey Jr.'s "Dolittle."

The movie is a reboot of the "Doctor Dolittle" films, which centers around Dr. John Dolittle, a doctor who can speak to animals. The movie, directed by "Syriana" director (??) Stephen Gaghan, has been plagued with reshoots and delays, and now, judging by the scathing reviews of the final product — one critic called it "the first worst movie of 2020" — we can start to understand why. Here is our roundup of the most vicious, funny lines from the reviews that dropped today:

• "Just when I thought Dolittle couldn't get any less funny or idiotic, Robert Downey Jr. sticks his arms up a dragon's asshole. And I do mean that literally." [io9]

• "The 1967 'Doctor Dolittle' was also a troubled, costly failure, so you could say this one is following in a classic tradition, of sorts. Mostly, Dolittle is further proof (as if any more were needed) that a recognizable IP and a budget well north of $100 million are no guarantee of a film anyone would want to sit through." [Birth.Movies.Death]

• "You go into this thing expecting silly insouciance and walk away from it questioning reality. It is anti-cinema." [Vulture]

• "[T]his exorbitantly expensive January toss-off, which could prove satisfying for certain sickos and freaks out there who have, post-Cats, become hooked on cinematic car crashes involving digitized faunae." [Vanity Fair]

• "Even the actor's [Robert Downey Jr.] legendary charisma, which this project sorely needed, gets tamped down by making a depressed widower the hero of a kiddie movie and by having that widower mumble in an accent that's possibly Welsh, perhaps Irish, maybe Scottish, but definitely the enemy of comedy." [The Wrap]

• "At some point during its troubled gestation, the movie once known as 'The Voyage of Doctor Dolittle' was renamed 'Dolittle.' Was 'voyage' too fusty, 'doctor' too fancy? Whatever the case, it's too bad that the rest of this movie couldn't have been ditched as well, or at least dramatically shortened." [The New York Times]

• "Downey performed opposite plenty of computer-generated characters on Marvel's behalf, but any similarities end there. Even for ardent animal lovers, 'Dolittle' is the kind of misguided dud that's hard to like, much less love 3,000." [CNN]

• "Dolittle is the kind of bad movie that puts the badness of other films in perspective. The current bad movie du jour, Cats, is bizarre and alarming, but at least it's consistent in its presentation of a nightmarish world populated only by weirdly sexual human-cat hybrids. Cats is deranged, but it's still something. Dolittle, in contrast, is nothing — except an unpleasant mess." [ScreenCrush]

• "[T]his latest 'Dolittle' is downright sloppy." [Variety]

• "Robert Downey, Jr. talks to the animals in Dolittle, an object lesson in cinematic incoherence that would be easy to dismiss as a hot mess if it could even raise a temperature." [Rolling Stone]

• "Though the film centers on the veterinarian from Hugh Lofting's classic children's books, it feels more like it's been tended to by an aggressive taxidermist, chopped into bits and assembled into a shape that barely makes sense." [Polygon]

• "Amidst what feels like the fingerprints of a thousand studio executives, it's also nearly impossible to nail down the original intentions of the director who actually made it[.]" [EW]

• "No doctor can cure what ails this Dolittle." [The Hollywood Reporter]

• "Everyone has at least one movie that they watched on repeat throughout their childhood that they know, without a doubt, isn't as good as they remember […] Universal's new Dolittle film, starring Robert Downey Jr., is another one of these wonky flicks, but it happens to be hitting theaters about 15 years too late." [Comicbook]

• "The January dumping ground is exactly where this trash belongs." [IGN]

• "Everyone knows that if you don't have anything nice to say, you shouldn't say anything at all. Less well known is the adage: 'You can't publish a movie review that is entirely blank.' When it comes to 'Dolittle,' that's too bad." [The Washington Post]

• "Dolittle is the kind of film made to the [sic] appeal to what Hollywood deems the lowest common denominator of audiences, to hell with smart writing and messages that treat children like human beings. We have to get that dragon fart joke in there." [SlashFilm]

• "The only thing 'Dolittle' does well is out-bomb the infamous bomb 'Doctor Dolittle,' and that is one for the history books." [Los Angeles Times]

And if you're not ready to brave 'Dolittle' in theaters, watch the trailer here: