Dr. Doolittle 2 ***
Directed by Steve Carr
Written by Hugh Lofting (Original stories), Larry Levin
Starring: Eddie Murphy, Kristen Wilson, Jeffrey Jones, Kevin Pollak
Featuring the voices of: Norm MacDonald, Lisa Kudrow and Steve Zahn
Rated PG (language, crude humor)
Summer is a wonderful time of the year. The sun shines, the grill gets fired up, and you don’t have to think when you go to the movies. That’s not meant to be a harsh indictment of Hollywood, and it’s not a dig at the film – it’s actually one of the good parts about summer. Dr. Doolittle 2 fits the formula quite well. Actually, it fits several formulas quite well.
Dr. John Doolittle (Murphy), as we all know, can talk to the animals, which tends to be both a blessing and a curse. While he knows what his dog, Lucky (voiced by Norm MacDonald) is thinking, he has no idea what his eldest daughter, Charisse (Raven-Symone from ‘The Cosby Show’), has going on in her head. At least some of this can be traced to the fact that she’s a teenage girl. Understanding a teenage girl requires a whole other set of mystical powers.
Charisse’s 16th birthday party is interrupted by a racoon who insists that Dr. Doolittle speak with ‘The Beaver’. ‘The Beaver’ requests Doolittle’s help in saving the forest from a logging company (cue bad guy music). I found the environmental subplot to be a bit heavy-handed, and it felt sort-of tacked on. But, the writers needed something to get Doolittle into the forest with Archie the Bear.
Archie (voiced by Steve Zahn) is a male bear in an endangered species. The only female, Eva (voiced by Lisa Kudrow) lives in the forest. Archie, however, was raised in a circus, and thus has no survival skills. Archie is a well-meaning nerd, to put it nicely. He’s charming, but just a little bit slow. (This is the ‘outsider-trying-to-win-the-heart-of-the-popular-girl’ formula.) Funny stuff happens while another subplot is taking place: Charisse is growing up!
Now, the good Doctor also wants to be a good father. He tries talking to Charisse, she’s a teenage girl, you can see where this is going. Thankfully, not much time is spent here either. Unlike Tom Hanks or Jim Carrey, I just don’t think that Eddie Murphy can do drama, and I don’t think that he should try – his comedy talents are plentiful, and he nearly always delivers. Why mess with a good thing?
The bulk of the movie is filled with Doolittle’s trials in training (or untraining, as the case may be) Archie, and that is just fine. There are some clever cameos (Steve ‘The Crocodile Hunter’ Irwin as himself; Andy Richter (former sidekick on ‘Late Night with Conan O’Brien’) as a zookeeper), plenty of voices that you just know you’ve heard before, and enough butt jokes to entertain the 10-year-old in all of us. The ‘crude humor’ in the rating is actually not all that crude – most of the comedy is slapstick and one-liners. Importantly, while the humor is mostly kid-friendly, there's enough nudge-nudge-wink-wink to keep adults entertained as well.
