A Failed Comedy

"Man Of the Year"

A great idea for a movie, and one so representitive of our current times. Robin Williams as a smart personable political comedian who has a show on TV. (John Stewart, anyone?) Suddenly he has the idea to run for president. He wins. There you have the great set up for a funny political movie to follow him through his first year or so and see what changes in the three branches of the US Government because of him. A real opportunity for a writer and a director to make a good point and really say something about the current political climate. But no, that doesn't happen. Instead you get a pseudo-comedy that looks great in the previews and completely fails when you watch the entire thing.

Apparently the writer didn't think that the above story line was enough and wasn't fully satisfied with just writing a comedy. He (Barry Levinson) wanted to make this a political thriller and by doing so, failed miserably at a comedy and at a thriller. He introduces a computer programmer (Laura Linney) who works for a company that gets the go ahead to do the entire electronic voting booths throughout the country. She finds a bug in the program, and alerts the CEO, but he sees his stock rising and if he were to announce this glitch, he would lose a lot of money, so he drugs her, gets her put into a hospital and fires her from the company. The rest of the story is her trying to tell Robin Williams that he's not actually president and the electronic voting company trying to find her to stop her from telling anybody.

Both ideas are good alone, but somehow they completely fail when put together. Kind of like lobster and oreos. You like lobster, and you like oreos, but sandwich some lobster between oreos.... I don't think so.

Needless to say, I was dissapointed. It could have been a great movie. I guess I like "Dave" too much and thought from the previews I was getting into something more reminicent of that. I guess I'll just have to watch "Dave" sometime this weekend. Kevin Kline is great in that movie.