Advertisement

Review:  Expect a shout fest from ‘The Angriest Man in Brooklyn’

Share

Robin Williams is given 90 minutes to live in “The Angriest Man in Brooklyn.”

The movie doesn’t even need five minutes to signal that it’s already a goner.

Williams, perhaps a little too excited to have another starring role in film, plays put-upon lawyer Henry Altmann. He’s a deeply irksome crank whose profane, two-drink-minimum rants we’re supposed to find funny, and whose mission to make amends — after getting the death-sentence diagnosis from a frazzled young doctor (Mila Kunis) — is intended to be funny and heartwarming. (The key to how moviegoers will likely feel is in the title.)

The head-scratcher is that this junky, risible fermata of yelling is from director Phil Alden Robinson, who knows from midlife-crisis humor (“Field of Dreams”), and whose big-budget Jack Ryan movie (“The Sum of All Fears”) felt quieter and more human. Here, every scene between two people comes off like drunkenly shot video of a play rehearsal gone horribly wrong.

This remake of an Israeli movie comes with a screenplay credited to Daniel Taplitz. The whole ugly enterprise — screaming set-tos with a wife (Melissa Leo) and an old friend (Richard Kind), plus a tonally disastrous face-off with a foreign-born cab driver — feels like something even a sentimental misanthrope like Billy Wilder would have avoided like the plague.

------------

“The Angriest Man in Brooklyn”

MPAA rating: R for language and sexual content.

Running time: 1 hour, 23 minutes.

Playing: At AMC Burbank Town Center 8.

Advertisement