So Dr Dolittle carts his family, along with his assortment of pets. There’s Lucky, his pet dog, his chameleon, tortoise, racoon and a whole lot of animals, and of course his bear Archie. The game plan is to get Archie to mate with Ava, a bear from the wilderness and one of the endangered species.

First Dr Dolittle has to mollify his teenage daughter, Charisse, who is experiencing the pangs of first love. So she decides to bring her boy-friend Eric (Lil’ Zane) along. Now the forest is filled with a happy mix of humans and animals. The good animal doctor has to work overtime with Cupid for apart from the bears and Charisse his dog Lucky finds the neighbouring lone wolf good company.

Actually Eddie Murphy and Larry Levin have put together a cute little script with the action shuttling between human and animal problems and director Steve Carr weaves a fairly credible story. Of course there is bound to be exaggeration, but the narrative is strong and with ecology or environment-consciousness coming into play, there is also a moral. The building lobby (Jeffrey Jones and Kevin Pollack) is made up of caricatures and the story takes a predictable course but at no moment does it pall.

In fact, Eddie Murphy, the actor is kept well under control. Let loose he could be as disastrous as Jim Carrey and all the animals and humans pull in their weight to turn in a rather amusing and interesting story. Special effects too are used judiciously. It is an entertainer that will keep both children and adults happy and that is more than most children’s films do these days.

The same cannot be said about Cats & Dogs, which tries to build up a story of the age-old rivalry between these two of man’s most common pets. So far so good. But the story that is woven around these creatures is far to weak to last the 90 minutes it is supposed to.

First the Brody family is quite colourless (unlike Dr Dolittle and family). The Prof (Jeff Goldblum), who is working on a cure for folks allergic to dogs, never really enters into the thick of the subject. Mrs Brody (Elizabeth Perkins) is purely decorative and Brody Jr (Alexander Pollack) is neither here nor there.

Mr Tinkles is the cat who plans to put a wedge between the dogs and the humans and the ones targeted are the Brody pets, Butch and Lou. In this film, the accent is on special effects. All kinds of gadgets keep flying about but the storyline is almost non-existent. Then director Larry Guterman doesn’t even give the characters enough time to develop. The result is the viewer is pitched from one episode to another with little expectation and even less suspense.

There may be a few good asides like for example the training of the police dogs in the best military academy films like Top Gun or An Officer and a Gentleman but that is scarcely enough to sustain the viewer’s interest and one has to virtually wade through a good deal of gimmickry at a high decibel level which is far from comfortable to adults (accompanying their children). Why, even children are not likely to be absorbed in the proceedings after the halfway mark.

Cats & Dogs is surely the weakest of the three, that is after Shrek and Dr Dolittle.