Death To Smoochy [Special Edition]

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After a decade of doing almost nothing but saccharine-laced blather like "Bicentennial Man," "Patch Adams," "What Dreams May Come," "Flubber," and "Jack," Robin Williams decided to take a brief hiatus from filmmaking and come back with a new, darker persona. The result was "Insomnia," "One-Hour Photo," and "Death to Smoochy." Although the first two movies may have shown him as a worthy villain, "Smoochy" is a decided backfire, a halfhearted attempt at black comedy and satire that's neither very funny nor very insightful and turns remarkably sentimental by the end. It's mostly mean-spirited, though, and no amount of climactic contrition can make up for its unpleasant beginnings.

Part of the film's weakness, I'd say, is its inability to decide what it wants to be. It starts out quite disagreeably with downright nasty dark humor; then it tries to let up and shift the meanness into an excuse for spoofing television, exploitation, and greed, already a field thoroughly plowed in the cinema; and, finally, it winds up inexplicably turning into a conventional, feel-good situation comedy. By not sticking with a specific attitude, the film dilutes all three of its subject areas.

Williams plays "Rainbow" Randolph, the greedy, conceited, foulmouthed host of a popular children's TV show. He's a big-time star who gets his nickname from his trademark rainbow coat, and he's as crooked as a cheap politician. At the outset of the movie, he's arrested by the FBI for taking bribes to put kids on his show. It's hard to tell if Williams was given free rein to improvise as much he usually does because the character he plays is so one-dimensional--a corrupt, perpetual whiner and wimp. The movie even resorts to having him do outright slapstick--literally bouncing off the walls and falling down stairs--in a desperate appeal for laughs. But not only is Randolph unscrupulous and unpleasant, so is almost everyone else in the story, including the kiddie-show producers, the agents, the sponsors, and the network brass.

The only one with any morals to speak of is Rainbow's successor, Sheldon "Smoochy the Rhinoceros" Mapes, played delightfully by Edward Norton, who seems capable of doing almost any role he's handed. Here he portrays a guy so squeaky clean, so honest and true and politically correct, he eats only chemical-free, salt-free organic food. The trouble is, Smoochy is incredibly boring and everybody but Smoochy knows it. The single reason he gets the job after Randolph is fired is because he's the only children's entertainer in the country the kids' network can find who isn't a degenerate, an alcoholic, or a wife beater! Naturally, he becomes an instant success, a national sensation, and Randolph, now broke and dejected, goes berserk. Randolph becomes delusional, sees Smoochy as a spawn of Satan, and determines first to sabotage his show and then to kill him.

Yes, Norton's Smoochy is literally the only decent person in the film. Everyone else is a liar, a crook, a hypocrite, a mercenary, or a creep. The show's producers, Nora Wells (Catherine Keener) and Frank Stokes (Jon Stewart), are tough cookies who want only to make money not only from the show but from the ancillary merchandising of Smoochy products like cola, cookies, dolls, and lunch boxes. And Smoochy's agent, Burke (Danny DeVito), is a weasel who'd sell out his mother for a profit. Then there's a punch-drunk ex-boxer, Spinner Dunn (Michael Rispoli), who wants to be in Smoochy's show. His gangsterish sister and brothers strong arm Smoochy into letting the poor guy do his bit. Harvey Fierstein plays another gangster type, Merv Green, who heads up a phony charity that cons people out of their money and who also tries to strong arm Smoochy by getting him to do a highly commercialized Ice Show. Finally, the wonderful character actor Vincent Schiavelli turns up as Buggy Ding Dong, another former children's show host, now drug addicted, who's hired as a hit man.

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