These last few years have been dominated by Disney. With the MCU and Star Wars both being under the Disney umbrella it is hard to avoid their grip on Hollywood. Throw in their original films and their remakes of classics and you can't seem to go a day without hearing about a film produced by the studio. This is not necessarily a problem. I am a massive Star Wars fan and so I won't complain about them. The Marvel films are all fun and we need more original films these days. But the one I have a problem with are the remakes. They are complete cash grabs, are never as good as the original and often spit in the face of the original film, I'm looking at you Beauty and the Beast (2017). But in the case of Dumbo (2019) I didn't feel as much anger as I am sure I will feel towards Aladdin (2019) or The Lion King (2019). This is mainly due to the fact I don't have as close a connection to the original film having seen it when I was very young and not remembering much of it, and so going in I was hoping it would surprise me. Well, I may not have been angry going in but boy did the film change that mood. The films story follows a young baby Elephant, the titular Dumbo, who is born into the Circus and is ridiculed for his abnormally large ears. In order to keep this under wraps, the circus master, Max Medici (Danny DeVito), makes Holt Farrier (Colin Farrell) the Elephant keeper and asks him to come up with an act that cover Dumbo's ears. However, when Holt's children, Milly (Nico Parker) and Joe (Finley Hobbins), discover Dumbo's ability to fly he becomes the most famous attraction in America. This attracts the attention of Circus mogul, V. A. Vandevere (Michael Keaton), who gives Medici a contract where his troupe is able to live in splendour and perform for him as long as Dumbo is also performing for him. However, when it becomes clear that Vandavere's intentions are not what he claimed them to be it is up to the Farriers, Medici, the Circus troupe and there new friend, Colette Marchant (Eva Green), to escape and set Dumbo free.
I don't really know why I was hoping for a surprise from this film. I am not a fan of Disney remakes and I don't like Tim Burton and so to think I might have liked this film was probably wishful thinking. But I didn't expect it to be this bad, this boring, this poorly acted. It was across the board pretty terrible. Well, maybe not quite across the board. The CGI in the film is very impressive, especially on Dumbo. He always felt like a real character and that he was really there, whilst also keeping a kind of cartoon like look which is in keeping with the feel of the film. But good CGI never stopped the film from being totally boring. For a film which is less than 2 hours it felt like an eternity. Every conflict was introduced and resolved super quickly and there was no major conflict that continued throughout the narrative. Well, there might have been one involving Dumbo's mother, but they forget about that almost as soon as it is introduced and then bring it back up with only about twenty minutes of the film left. The writing on the whole is very poor, with characters who are so poorly fleshed out and who have motivations that seem to turn on a dime. Also several characters that become key later in the plot are barely involved in the rest of the film and I didn't even remember seeing most of them before they appeared at the climax. One thing I can say about the narrative though is that it is so different from the original Dumbo that it can actually be said that it is not a pointless remake. Whereas the Beauty and the Beast remake copied the original almost exactly, Dumbo takes narrative changes and introduces characters who were not in the original film which is a positive. Shame all these changes made it so much worse.
Easily the worst and most unredeemable aspect of this film is in the performances. What makes this worse is the fact that this cast is really good. Colin Farrell, Michael Keaton, Eva Green and Danny DeVito are all actors who I really like and who have done some very good work in the past, but not one of them is good in this film. Danny DeVito is probably the closest to being good and that's mainly just because he is just being Danny DeVito, but everyone else is really, really poor. Eva Green's performance is so forgettable and pretty lifeless. Colin Farrell is struggling through his accent which really hampers him. Michael Keaton, who I was banking on being a bit of a shining light in the film, is terrible as the villain. I don't know what his performance is, with some weird accent, bipolar mood swings and terrible line delivery. I can only think that these performances are down to the terrible script and poor directing on Burton's part. But I am not sure anything or anyone could have saved the performances of Nico Parker and Finley Hobbins. I feel bad criticising them this much because they are just kids, but they put in two of the worst performances of the year. They are lifeless, emotionless and bland and we are with them for a good 50% of the film. Their performances are a huge problem. Their lack of quality is often times laughable and it is so distracting when they are on screen because nothing they say seems real. Dumbo seems more real than these two. Like I said, they are just kids and I hope that they improve and have long and successful careers, but this is already a blemish on their CVs.
Dumbo is the worst film I have seen this year so far, and is probably only pipped by Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald (2018) as the worst film I have seen since I started doing these reviews. The CGI is its only saving grace, but for a film with a budget of this size you would expect the CGI to be very good. Other than this it fails on almost all aspects. The script is terrible, the characters and their motivations are poorly portrayed and the performances, to a man, are all very poor. But the most heinous crime this film commits is that it is boring. Even bad films can be entertaining, but this one couldn't even succeed in that aspect. But, at the end of the day, this film is not for me. It is for kids and I think kids will probably enjoy it for its bright visuals and Dumbo as a character. However, I wouldn't recommend it even if you had kids to take, and you know why? Because there is a better version of this film that came out 78 years ago and still holds up today. Show your kids that one. And if you don't have kids then avoid the 2019 version. Avoid it like the bloody plague.