Man Of The Year

[MacGuffin]

Trailer

Release Date: October 13, 2006

Cast: Robin Williams, Christopher Walken, Laura Linney, Jeff Goldblum, Lewis Black

Director: Barry Levinson

Premise: On a lark, the host of a late-night political talk show decides to run for president. The thing is, he never expected to win.

[grand theft sparrow]

SPOILERS

This was fucking terrible.  This might be my pick for worst film of the year and it definitely goes in the top 5 most dishonestly marketed films of all time.  Watch the trailer again.  The movie that it advertises does not exist.  It is not even close to being the light-hearted comedy the commercials show you.  It doesn't know whether it's a Capra-esque satire on politics, a la Dave but without the romance and with more drama, or a corporate conspiracy thriller like The Net with Sandra Bullock.  Trying to mesh these two very incongruous types of films produces this giant mess no one could see coming.

On one hand, Robin Williams' character is very endearing.  He's the guy you wish would run for president in real life.  He's the guy with balls that most moderates, be they Republicans or Democrats, would likely vote for.  He represents the ideal(ized) politician: honest, charismatic, and above all, with the people's interest in mind. 

But the middle of the film is almost entirely about Laura Linney, an employee for a company that developed a computerized voting machine, who discovers an unintentional fault in the program which may or may not have accidentally swung the election for Williams.  She winds up being thrown to the wolves after pushing the company to go public with this information, which would make the company's stock drop.  She winds up going on the lam, basically, trying to convince Williams of the truth, the whole time trying (and failing miserably) to prove herself to not be insane.

Throw in a bunch of unnecessary minor things like Christopher Walken's telling the story (not to mention his emphysema), Laura Linney's only-there-to-be-a-device-to-push-the-story-along co-worker, and a bunch of things that either a president-elect would NEVER do or that Secret Service would never allow to happen and you've got what can only be described as a clusterfuck.  Because it is marketed as a comedy, and because of Williams' presence, all of the peril that Linney never comes off as being dire.  The audience I was with was laughing through a few scenes with Linney that were not actually funny, because they thought maybe it was dark humor.  The unevenness of this film is astonishing.  It's amazing that this film was given a greenlight, and if not for Robin Williams' star power, it probably never would have been made at all.

Either the Williams or Linney subplots on their own would make a watchable film, not necessarily good, but at least something that wouldn't make you lament the money and time spent.  Honestly, if the Linney subplot was made into a film with Linney as the main character and pushing Williams' character in the back, it would have made more sense.  I think Barry Levinson just had 60 pages of one idea and 60 pages of the other and decided to fuse the two together.

This is the sort of movie that the right-wingers will jump on as liberal propaganda, and sadly, I have to agree in some way.  This film's saving grace is that it should, hopefully, illustrate the dangers of computerized voting machines with no paper trails enough that they won't ever be used.  But there really is no purpose for this movie to exist except for saying that this is a bad idea. 

I think this takes the cake from Da Vinci Code as worst of the year because Da Vinci may have been slow and boring as fuck, but at least the tone was even and it knew what it was.