December 21, 1999
Web posted at: 12:06 p.m. EST (1706 GMT)

By Reviewer Paul Tatara

(CNN) -- The opening scenes of director Chris Columbus' "Bicentennial Man" are set in the near future, and the mundane realization of that future is emblematic of the rest of the movie. Robin Williams (who spends most of the film inside a face-obscuring metal suit) plays Andrew, a newfangled household robot that enters the lives of a boring family and brings them to boring revelations about their boring existence and their inescapable mortality. And it takes him 200 years to manage it.

Columbus is trying to make a point about how emotion gets overrun by technology as we're inexorably pulled toward bigger, better and smarter machines. But the only inexorable pull you'll be experiencing is that of the sandman. Andrew wants to be a human, all right. Probably because he needs some sleep.

Based on a short story and co-written novel (with Robert Silverberg) by Isaac Asimov -- who surely never envisioned this turn of events -- "Bicentennial Man" is a commercial movie up, down and backwards. It wants to deal with The Big Issues but simply doesn't have the gumption to do it. Columbus and screenwriter Nicholas Kazan are too busy orchestrating the usual fish out of water antics to even scratch the surface of their supposed subject matter.

Possibly rich scenes are set up, then everyone plows toward the Hallmark card moment. This happens so often the future begins to feel like a round robin of homilies and tearful farewells. Messier details of the human experience bubble up periodically, then sink back down into the sorghum.

A big part of the problem is that Columbus' visual technique is so by-the-numbers you never get the feeling that you're taking a two-century-long journey. No matter how often a graphic informs you that another 10 or 12 years has passed -- or how often computer-animated space cars zip through an ever-rising skyline -- you can't shake the sensation that every scene was shot within a three- or four-month period, probably in Burbank. You don't feel you've traveled somewhere any more than you do when you visit Paris at Epcot, or Venice in Las Vegas.

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Theatrical preview for "Bicentennial Man" Windows Media 28K 80K

Regardless of how you feel about Robin Williams (he'd better check himself; more and more people are volunteering that he irks them), you're bound to be exasperated by this performance.

It's painful to have to review his movies these days. Williams is obviously a very talented, intelligent man, although not so obviously the unmitigated genius that some people want to make him out to be. But it's as if his taste-o-meter is permanently stuck on huggy-kissy. He's become a walking, talking font of sappy platitudes rather than a real actor.

The overripe parts of his most successful early films were held in check by subject matter that had some meat. There were real tragedies in "Moscow on the Hudson" (1984) and "The World According to Garp" (1985), so Williams' occasional forays into sentimentality were welcome. But his films in the 1990s imply tragedy only as a brief prelude to Williams making it all better with a wacky, motor-mouthed Band-Aid. He's become more a consolation prize than a performer.

The events of "Bicentennial Man" play like a tape loop. It takes forever, and you see the same series of scenes five or six times before it's done. The first family that Andrew greases up consists of an understanding father (Sam Neil), a mother (Wendy Crewson) and two generic daughters, one of whom is played by Hallie Kate Eisenberg, the cute kid from the Pepsi commercials.

Andrew's voice, which has the fully expected robotic lack of emotion, grows tender in the presence of Eisenberg, and we see him doing would-be poetic things like listening to music on an old Victrola and carving an itty-bitty wooden horse. He's artistic. Dad begins to nurture Andrew's sensitive side, much against the advice of the cold-hearted corporation that invented him. Don't you hate those cold-hearted corporations?

Andrew grows increasingly sensitive as the family members get older and die. Then their children physically deteriorate over the course of a lifetime (courtesy of the usual bad makeup), Andrew gets even more sensitive, and the children die. Then it starts all over again with the next generation, just like "Star Trek."

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By the time Andrew finds a scientist (Oliver Platt) who's willing to give him lifelike skin and help him design functioning, human-like organs, he's more sensitive than a decaying molar. It's not very hard to imagine that he'll eventually dance with a beautiful woman and finally know the meaning of life.

It's a bad sign when you're watching a holiday movie and wind up rooting for death.

"Bicentennial Man" is about as risky as a pack of Tic-Tacs. There's one scene in which a naughty word gets batted back and forth, but that's just one of several verbal moments that play like badly re-imagined Abbot and Costello routines. The most disturbing scene is when Andrew, who resembles a factory-built Robin Williams, discovers the miracle of humor and starts slinging one-liners at the breakfast table as the family giggles lovingly. It's the perfect metaphor for what's happening to Williams himself. Rated PG. 132 minutes.