The Bicentennial Man

This film begins with a shot of an assembly line where robots and presumably Chris Columbus/Robin Williams collaborations are manufactured, and from there, it's two hours plus of excruciatingly banal (but, yes, true) pronouncements on the beauty of human uniqueness, the necessity of mortality, and why even your toaster oven needs a little TLC. Oh Jesus, where have you gone, Robin Williams? Here, he plays Andrew Martin, a robot that, er, who looks a lot a vewy, vewy sad Robin Williams, in an adaptation of Isaac Asimov's 1976 short story. Martin may be made of machine, but like the Tin Man, this scrap of metal has a heart, one that in turn is nurtured and rejected by the family he lives with. He also has quite a talent for making clocks -- even though the passage of time means zilch to him. As the press notes remark, "It is ironic." And so it goes and goes for some 200 years, Martin spending the first 180 behaving, if you can believe it, like a naive Forrest Gump. Finally, he wises up, some trite lessons are learned, and Martin turns into the lifeform known as Robin Williams, well-meaning, no longer very funny, and definitely, even for children, a bore.

-- Mark Bazer