Dumbo Review: 5 Ups & 5 Downs

3. The Script Is Wildly Uneven

Alarm bells were definitely ringing the moment that Ehren Kruger was hired to write Dumbo, given that he's responsible for penning the middle-three of Michael Bay's Transformers movies.

Unsurprisingly, Dumbo's script is ultimately its biggest failing, for though it's certainly not awful, it too often feels rote, formulaic and unwilling to take full advantage of its more intriguing elements.

Even accepting the abundance of ropey, exposition-infused dialogue, it feels like Kruger's ambition to open the Dumbo story up came without a clear idea of how to fully flesh out the original animated film.

As a result much of Dumbo's third act falls back into over-familiar family movie "save the day" shenanigans, where it threatens to go a little too over-the-top for its own good.