Bicentennial Man

* *

Cast: Robin Williams, Sam Neill, Embeth Davidtz, Oliver Platt

Director: Chris Columbus

Rating: PG

Opens: Today, Village, Hoyts Cinemas



Once you accept that yes, this is another cup - well, a can really - of Robin Williams' feelgood gloop, it's best perhaps to just enjoy whatever flavour you can get out of it.

Most of that comes from its old-fashioned sci-fi premise, a loose take on an Isaac Asimov short story about a robot who, during his service as longtime family retainer, finds a way to gain his humanity.

As such, it does offer the occasional poignant scene.

But the relentless sugarcoating on the storytelling, care of director Columbus (a man who thinks "heartwarming" is a genre), and Williams' permanently doleful, chromed expression does serve to make Bicentennial Man a slow, sentimental slog of a movie.

As to posing questions about what might constitute being human as opposed to something which started life as a machine, this is less, say, Blade Runner and more the Tin Man singing If I Only Had A Heart for two hours. Minus the catchy tune or the meaningful words.

It doesn't help that it starts off a bit underwhelming.

Williams' polite-to-a-fault android Andrew (who possibly went to the same finishing school as C3PO) arrives at the well-off family home of Sir (Neill) who, after convincing his wife and daughters that he might be useful to have around, becomes intrigued with his servant's creative endeavours which obviously aren't part of his programming.

The story totters forward, much like Williams' stiff gait, for a good hour, flashing through the decades. Andrew becomes the best friend of Sir's youngest, Little Miss (Davidtz), who when grown up is torn between her longtime confidant and her human fiance.

Andrew eventually gets itchy for the concept of freedom.

Flick forward a few more years and he's out wandering America looking for robots of his same model, which he finds scrapped or reprogrammed, only to meet android scientist Rupert Burns (Platt). With the benign doctor, Andrew develops hardware to make him increasingly human - or at least make him look and sound increasingly like Williams in the flesh.

Meanwhile, having fallen for Little Miss' lookalike adult granddaughter Portia (considering he was part of the family for more than a century, it raises an odd little incest question), he embarks on his final quest to be declared human - which comes with the ultimate catch.

The pity of it all is that under the admittedly impressive makeup and special effects (Columbus and Williams also paired on the cosmetically powered Mrs Doubffire) you can still see the ideas and a story that, in the right hands, might have flown. Instead, Bicennential Man is only a movie of nice moments, ones which unfortunately feel about 200 years apart.