Dumbo

Another live-action Disney remake is in the books, and, shock of all shocks, it’s not even as good as the original. Worse, it’s actually much weaker, more hollow and shallow, than a family film from the 1940s. About a small elephant with big ears. I’m honestly kinda baffled by this, even though I have no real reason to be.

2019’s Dumbo comes courtesy of Tim Burton, a director who, trust me kids, used to be interesting, even in his failures. We had a brief glimpse of life a few years back with Big Eyes, which, even in its relative restraint, showed that Burton still had a spark, a zest, some skill left in the director’s chair. But any hopes were washed away by the dull and lifeless – if admittedly not bad – Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children: Just as with Alice in Wonderland years prior, perhaps it was our fault for thinking that a former visionary like Burton would actually add some creativity to a story that has plenty of opportunities baked in, but I’m still laying the stagnation at the man’s feet. Buck stops with the director, after all, good or ill, much like with the manager of a baseball team.

Burton’s recent embrace of darkly-saturated colors (helped along here by occasional Marvel DP Ben Davis, who also, just to add some balance to his resume, lensed films like Three Billboards and Stardust) permeates this film, which, above all else, serves only to make every shot look fake and enhanced by digital VFX work. One might think this was a clear decision to bolster the fanciful nature of the story of an elephant calf born with extraordinarily large ears, ears that surprise everyone by allowing the animal to fly. Initially shunned by his circus and its patrons, the young creature finds his place in the world. (Well, I think that’s the story being told here; it was in the original, anyway…) Alas, the filmmakers all tried their damnedest to ground the film’s actions in the real world, injecting unnecessary garbage like a pair of kids living at the circus with their father, just returned home from the war without one of his arms, and a shady circus mogul looking to exploit the freakish animal. What this real-world rooting does, though, is painfully clutter and weigh down a fairly simple narrative and undermine any flights of fancy the audience could possibly experience. The focus is shifted away from the animals, who are stripped of their previous anthropomorphism, to the bland, stock humans, who range from duller than the concrete that made up the walls of my elementary schools (y’all remember those whitewashed bricks?) to overdrawn caricatures lacking motivation or reasoning. Everything is so devoid of depth and purpose that one could mistake the film for a flip book made of knockoff Norman Rockwell paintings manufactured by some hack who doesn’t understand why Rockwell got famous in the first place.

With such shallow material to work with, the cast winds up unable to stretch or succeed. Colin Ferrell’s trying as the aforementioned one-armed father, but his character is so demonstrably extraneous that he’s left to his Sisyphean struggles without much fanfare. Michael Keaton and Danny DeVito, the mogul and ringmaster, respectively, are allowed to coast on their charismas’ fumes, Eva Green’s wasted as a trapeze artist, and the kids are even more bland and useless than the usual stock child characters. The VFX almost work, but they’re overused (I know, I was shocked too), and Dumbo hisself winds up looking creepy and ridiculous more often than he does cute and endearing. Danny Elfman’s score, replete with his usual bombast and choral bits, is possibly the best part for me, but it’s often too loud in the mix, shouting down anything and everything on screen.

At the end of the day, I had low expectations for this film, especially with the lifelessness and hackery associated with the preceding remakes, but this one feels even worse, what with the overload of plot and character ballast and a fundamental miss of the original’s point and flavor. It’s not even entertaining in its laziness and ineptitude! Disney seems to be getting further and further away from being able to channel any sort of whimsy of imagination, and these remakes are increasingly looking like the company’s atrocious live-action fare from the 70s through the 90s. (Hell, maybe we can get yet another worthless Herbie the Love Bug reboot while we’re at it, eh?) Don’t bother with this worthlessness, even when it’s free on TV or at the library: It’s not worth your time at all.