There’s a throwaway bit late into Kevin Smith’s “Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back” in which a wigged out Will Ferrell barges in a taping of a kiddie TV show revolving around a dude in a bright coloured cow suit who does sing-alongs, and he accidentally shoots poor Mooby dead. That little Barney gag wasn’t particularly funny, but at least it was only 30 seconds out of a mostly hilarious picture. Now, imagine blowing up that one not so good joke to feature length and you’ll get an idea of what a bore “Death to Smoochy” is. Here’s a movie of which the extent of the comic output begins and end with its amusing title. See, Smoochy is a pink plush rhino suit who delights children with his silly songs, but it turns out that the kid TV business is a corrupted and ruthless one, and everyone wants him dead. That premise is actually pretty good, but it should be only a starting point, not one general idea which is stretched for 90 minutes with no punch-line.
So you’ve got Ed Norton as Sheldon Mopes, a naïve but overwhelmingly nice guy who sings ditties as Smoochy in methadone clinics until a bitchy TV executive (Catherine Keener) hires him to star in an after-school kid show in replacement of previous host Rainbow Randolph (Robin Williams), who was revealed as a crook who took bribes by parents who want their children to go on his program. This doesn’t please Randolph at all, and he vows revenge on the damn dirty rhino who stole his time slot. Meanwhile, Sheldon must also fend off greedy agents, executives and merchants who want to use Smoochy to sell all kinds of junk. But his refusal to sell out pisses off a lot of folks, and he’ll have to be careful if he doesn’t want to get killed! Tee-hee.
From what I can tell, writer Adam Resnick and director Danny De Vito set out to make a black comedy but then they backed out and contented themselves with a lot of tired, harmless humour. Oh, there’s a lot of naughty words sprinkled into every line of dialogue, but all the crude language in the world doesn’t make it the wild, demented comedy it wants to be. And it’s certainly not gonna get laughs from its one-dimensional characters. Some people say that it’s nice to see Robin Williams letting loose again after starring in a string of touchy-feely pictures these last few years. Personally, I’ll take him in “Good Will Hunting” or even “Patch Adams” over this manic crap any day. Williams is extremely grating as the lunatic Randolph, always desperately hamming it up, doing stupid voices and coming up with lame ad-libs, anything for laughs that never come.
Ed Norton can’t make the lousy material funny either, but at least he’s likable enough as the idealist, innocent Smoochy, even though he’s only there as a target of mockery. Oh, he eats healthy food! He doesn’t swear! He’s not interested in money! What a dork, right? The movie seems to think so at first when it wants to be satire, but later it decides out of the blue to be a sappy feel-good flick instead and suddenly Smoochy is a role model, he warms the heart of Keener’s bitchy executive (and gets her into bed) and, worse, he helps Randolph have a change of heart. What a cop-out, black comedy my ass!
De Vito, who also plays a totally unnecessary role in the movie (as does Jon Stewart), does an atrocious job behind the camera. Even on the rare occasion that he stumbles into something remotely amusing, the comic timing is all off. Scenes go on and on long after any potential humour has burnt out. There are countless stupid songs, which culminates with an endless ice show where even the hit-man sent to kill Smoochy falls asleep! And then there’s the Irish retard and his family of thugs. What can I even say that can translate how utterly pointless and dull this stuff is… “Death to Smoochy” is a complete failure. It’s spectacularly unfunny.