| Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures | Release Date: March 29, 2019 | CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
19
Mixed:
31
Negative:
5
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Critic Reviews
Mar 26, 2019
As far as acting, DeVito steals the show with characteristic energy a ringleader would be proud of. But Farrell's chemistry with the kids never takes off, costing the film a portion of emotion. And the writing doesn't help much, either. The family's relationship is supposed to be strained, but it never feels like they convincingly resolve insecure feelings around each other. Still, no matter how fans look at it, it's hard to deny how adorable Dumbo is.
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Apr 1, 2019
The best parts of the new film, by a long stretch, are the flying sequences, in which Dumbo wheels around inside the tent. Sometimes he even has a jockey, in the daring shape of Colette (Eva Green), the in-house trapeze artist. Elsewhere, however, we are dragged through patches of glum and listless drama.
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Mar 26, 2019
For all its cinematic bell and whistles, something about Dumbo feels hollow (I wrote that word three times in my notebook during the screening) as if it’s mouthing the proverbial words phonetically without knowing their meaning. Perhaps I walked into the theatre with too-high expectations. I slinked out with shoulders bowed.
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Mar 26, 2019
This movie has nearly as high a body count as "Us"...Is this satire? Homage? More like the desperation of a director who’s supplanted “vision” for emotion. The story leaves Dumbo without meaningful links to the human characters, and the scattered story of Farrell’s cohering family falls flat.
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Mar 26, 2019
This live-action remake of the 1941 Disney animated classic finds the eccentric, inconsistent filmmaker tapping into his career’s core emotional themes and, on occasion, Dumbo has the magic and wonder of his best work. (And that blue-eyed baby elephant is awfully cute.) But there remains a frustrating impersonality — not to mention an audience familiarity with his well-worn aesthetic — that keeps the film from soaring all that high.
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Mar 26, 2019
All of which is to say that Dumbo feels totally consistent with Burton’s late-period slump. Abysmally scripted and hammily acted – and not, for the most part, in an interesting or ironic way – Dumbo recasts Disney’s animated classic in the trappings and suits of Burton’s pinstripe-and-pinwheel upholstery.
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Mar 29, 2019
Trailers that highlighted circus performance and relied heavily on the magic of the flying elephant and the colorful world of Dreamland made Dumbo seem like it was meant as a memorable spectacle. If that was Burton’s intention, he failed. Dumbo quickly becomes the Panda Express of films — technically a full meal, but not satisfying or substantial.
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The PlaylistMar 26, 2019
Beyond Dumbo’s cuteness (which was so overwhelming that I now want a baby elephant for a pet, which is surely not the point of the film) and Keaton’s perfectly over-the-top performance, there’s little to latch on to in this Disney film. It throws so much at the audience that nothing really sticks, leaving such a small impression for such a big movie.
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Mar 26, 2019
And that’s what this overly eager, fractious, Burtonized but standardized, loudly comic but ultimately rather mirthless remake does to Dumbo. It transforms a miraculous tale into a routine story by weighing it down with a lot of nuts and bolts it didn’t need. The character of Dumbo is still touching, but the tale of entrapment and rescue that surrounds him is not. It’s arduous and forgettable, done in busy italicized strokes, and apart from that FX elephant the movie doesn’t come up with a single character who hooks us emotionally.
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The TelegraphMar 26, 2019
The problem with this latest entry in Disney’s ever-expanding range of recycled classics isn’t that it hews too close to the studio’s original animated masterpiece, but that its many departures only muddle the original’s nursery-rhyme simplicity and neuter its famous sustained emotional wallop.
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