The Robin Williams movie Roger Ebert hated with a passion: “Odd, inexplicable, and unpleasant”
There’s arguably no actor in Hollywood history who was equally adept at comedy and drama as Robin Williams, who began his career on the stand-up circuit before taking cinema by storm with his endless supply of energy and freewheeling improvisation before he evolved into a top-tier performative powerhouse.
There are plenty of stars who’ve excelled in slapstick fare before establishing themselves as thespians to be reckoned with – Jim Carrey and Adam Sandler being two of the most notable examples – but Williams’ body of work across stage and screen put him into a bracket all of his own.
Just as capable of having audiences rolling in the aisles with laughter as he was causing them to wipe away the tears, Williams was a force of nature on two fronts. Of course, nobody boasts a 100% success rate regardless of which genre sandbox they’re playing in, and the Academy Award winner’s filmography wasn’t without its fair share of notable misfires.
The likes of Old Dogs, The Big Wedding, Francis Ford Coppola’s Jack, Man of the Year, and Flubber were just some of Williams’ feature-length low points, but none of them incurred the wrath of Roger Ebert quite like Death to Smoochy, which is fair enough when the movie completely wasted both its premise and its high-powered creative team.
A dark, satirical, and cynical comedy directed by Danny DeVito, Williams plays the star of a popular kids’ TV series who gets fired after a scandal and replaced by Edward Norton’s wholesome title character. Refusing to accept his new position as a jobbing actor, the leading man’s Randolph Smiley makes it his mission to seek revenge and reclaim his position as the face of the show.
It had plenty of potential, especially with the talent involved, but Death to Smoochy was a bad movie that bordered on a trainwreck. Ebert was fully aware that Williams, DeVito, Norton, Catherine Keener, Jon Stewart, and the rest of the big names were capable of making something excellent, even if he did see it as a double-edged coin in this case.
“Only enormously talented people could have made Death to Smoochy,” he wrote in his review. “Those with lesser gifts would have lacked the nerve to make a film so bad, so miscalculated, so lacking any connection with any possible audience. To make a film this awful, you have to have enormous ambition and confidence and dream big dreams.”
He clearly wasn’t a fan, and he wasn’t alone. Critics resoundingly trashed the film, which also bombed embarrassingly hard at the box office after failing to recoup even a fifth of its production budget, and it immediately took its place among the bottom rung of Williams’ filmography. As Ebert said, “In the annals of the movies, few films have been this odd, inexplicable, and unpleasant.”
