Bicentennial Man

December 9, 2004

Rated: PG Runtime: 131 min Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

Take an Isaac Asimov short story, combine it with Robin Williams, whip up some humorous looking trailers and what do you get? A neat little Scifi flick with some comedy mixed in? Not even close, instead this is a clever trap to sucker us poor unsuspecting guys into a chick flick at Christmas!

Set in the “not too distant future”, the Martin family gets the latest in state of the art home appliances, a home robot. The robot, played by Williams, takes Andrew as his name. But as the family quickly discovers, Andrew is not an ordinary robot as he starts to show creative tendancies and eventually emotions. He starts out looking like a robot, more exactly he looks like some sort of short gay version of Robocop. However after a few upgrades he starts to look alot like Robin Williams, and we’re dragged along on his journey toward becoming more human and his relationships with his human owners.

The problem is instead of fully exploring the humor aspect of a robot trying to fit in with a family and taking advantage of Williams’ humor, this movie dives headlong into the emotional aspect of love and interpersonal relationships with a machine. I was expecting to see Julia Roberts or Meg Ryan show up in a scene any minute. By two thirds of the way through this movie the thing is pure drama and romance.

Williams does his usual good acting job. Much like Tom Hanks, no matter what his background is you now have to think he can play virtually any role and play it well. Credit where it’s due, the quality of the acting and the overall production is excellent. However, I miss the manic guy with rainbow suspenders. When is the last time Robin did a really good comedy or something other than a few light moments in what is otherwise a drama? Arguably it would be “Toys” way back in 1992.

The kids get duped on this movie as well. I made the mistake of doing an earlier show than I normally do and as such there was an enormous kiddie factor. Probably 75% of the people in the theatre were mom’s bringing the kids to see it. The kiddies seemed to enjoy it well enough while the “robot man” was on the screen, but by halfway thru he no longer looks like a robot. And there is no justice, the mom’s made the kids be quiet because they wanted to hear this drek whereas they would’ve let them run around and disturb everyone in a guy movie. But that’s a whole different rant, so I digress!

This Christmas season if your wife or girlfriend fails to see the humor in your mistletoe belt buckle or gets word of what you did at the office Christmas party and you need to make it up to her, she will most likely love this movie. And it does at least have enough humor for the average guy to tolerate it and pretend like he likes it, just hope that she doesn’t want to discuss it on the way home. When you get home, go plop something like The Matrix into the DVD player and cleanse your pallette, and you’ll feel better.

Posted by Billy Bob | Filed Under 2 Stars, Action, Embeth Davidtz, Oliver Platt, PG, Robin Williams, Sam Neill, SciFi, Theatrical