Clunky, rudderless, empty. It's like it never got out of the scriptment stage, all clunky story beats and placeholder dialogue, and an ill-conceived ending where the circus claims to no longer have captive animals before showing a bunch of them (horses, monkeys and fish count!), the girl wows people with her scientific wonders which consist solely of a zoetrope that would have been old news twenty years earlier, and the boy's happy ending is getting to ride a dog.
Mostly comprising flat, medium shots, it has all the directorial verve of a tv advert. And the performances are professional but joyless. Even Dumbo himself is charmless - he has an utterly unexpressive face, and his huge baby-blue eyes do not work when framed with photoreal wrinkly elephant skin. He's not half as cute as, say, a real baby elephant.
Rating: Awful.
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