THE ANGRIEST MAN IN BROOKLYN (2014)

Genre: Drama/Comedy
Director: Phil Alden Robinson
Cast: Robin Williams, Mila Kunis, Peter Dinklage, Melissa Leo, James Earl Jones, Hamish Linklater, Sutton Foster, Richard Kind, Isiah Whitlock Jr., Lee Garlington, Daniel Raymont
RunTime: 1 hr 23 mins
Rating: M18 (Sexual Scene & Coarse Language)
Released By: GV
Official Website: 

Opening Day: 19 June 2014

Synopsis: Henry Altmann is having a horrible day, made much worse by his visit with Dr. Sharon Gill, who abruptly informs him that he only has 90 minutes to live. After storming out of the hospital in disbelief, Henry panics and races through Brooklyn in an attempt to right all of the wrongs in his life, while Sharon desperately scrambles to find him and get him into surgery.

Movie Review:

What would you do if you suddenly discovered that you had only 90 more minutes to live? That, in a nutshell, is the crux of Phil Alden Robinson’s film, which stars Robin Williams as the titular individual who is told by the doctor he sees at the public hospital that he has a brain aneurysm and therefore a much limited lifespan on Earth. Ironically, his volatile temperament will apparently only exacerbate his condition, which means he can’t even afford to get angry with the whole world even in his last few moments if he wants to have a little more time to live.

The premise isn’t new - Robinson is in fact remaking the 1997 Israeli comedy ‘The 92 Minutes Mr Baum’ in which a bitter man must, within the 90 minutes he has told he has left, reconnect with his estranged family and make sense of his whole entire existence. And in adapting this English language remake, screenwriter Daniel Taplitz has not only retained the original’s faux-existential framework, he has also kept its dual voiceover track - one by Williams and the other by his Dr Sharon Gill played by Mila Kunis - though admittedly the storytelling technique doesn’t work as well here.

Other than for the novelty of it, there is hardly any compelling reason why Williams’ agitated crank Henry Altmann or Kunis’ Dr Gill would have the capacity of narrating the inner thoughts of the other character, especially not when it’s hardly clear that there even is a palpable connection between them. Not to say that the story doesn’t try - for more than half its duration, it has Kunis chasing after Williams in a bid to tell him that she has grossly exaggerated the duration of the time he has left to live, and that her answer was in fact taken from the cover of a cookbook on just how long it takes to cook a turkey.

In the meantime, Williams is on his own quest to make amends with those he had inadvertently alienated due to his irksome personality - a son (Hamish Linklater) whom he chastised for giving up a legal career to become a dancer as well as his wife (Melissa Leo) whom he has not made love to for the past two years. Needless to say, by the end of the movie, he would have made the requisite reconciliations with his family - and maybe even bought himself a little more time to spend the last few moments of his life with the ones that he loves; that however does not include the foreign-born cabbie (Daniel Raymont) or the stuttering shopowner (James Earl Jones) both of whom he insults during the course of the day.

There’s a thin line between being mean and portraying the mean streak of a character, but Robinson takes a ham-fisted approach to the material that conveniently dismisses the importance of such nuances. Indeed, it’s hard to tell exactly what he intends especially with the tonal inconsistencies of the story, which lurches clumsily from jokey set pieces to melodramatic confrontations to occasional bursts of aggression without much rhyme or reason. The sum of all these disparate reasons makes for a particularly disjointed whole, which can’t quite make it its mind whether it wants to be a comedy or a thoughtful family drama and ends up being neither amusing or poignant.

As the lead on whose shoulders the entire movie rests on, Williams unfortunately disappoints. He is a comic actor first and foremost, and there is a dramatic weight to the movie that he fails to lift. Even in the examination room where he first learns about his condition, Williams fails to get his audience to believe in his predicament, his strain to convey the conflicted emotions of his character showing in every sinew of his face. He also has zero chemistry with Kunis - not that it matters much anyways, because she barely registers as well.

We’re not quite sure what prompted the filmmakers to choose Williams as their lead, but whatever their intentions, Williams’ alternately shrill and blubbering routine isn’t the only reason why the film is a mess. It isn’t just anger that the film fails to convey, but also a whole lot of funny and heartwarming that it clearly aspires but doesn’t achieve. And as the surest indication of that, it isn’t even long enough to last the full 90 minutes its character has to endure, even though it does feel much much longer than that. 

Movie Rating:

(Neither amusing nor heartwarming though it aspires to be, this tonally inconsistent dramedy also falters on a weak lead performance from Robin Williams)

Review by Gabriel Chong