Robin Williams outdoes ‘RV’ for stupidity – ‘Old Dogs’ Review

Posted on December 10, 2009 - 1:13am by michael Old Dogs is, more than anything else, spectacularly dumb. It’s the kind of thing that you watch and find yourself completely baffled that it ever made it into the hands of a serious production company, much less a big-name actor, much less two big-name actors. I got the impression at numerous points along the lines that the deadpan slapstick filling the movie was originally intended to be good-natured comedy for little kids in the vein of Home Alone, complete with cartoonish musical cues informing us when we’re supposed to laugh. But the reality is that it was haphazardly flung together with all caution having been long since thrown to the wind, leaving me with the feeling that it was the sound department who was left with the impossible mission of injecting some laughs into the painfully unfunny material. John Travolta and Robin Willians play Charlie and Dan, two business partners with all the characteristics that Hollywood demands for cheap sitcom partners (Charlie’s the outgoing, partying social butterfly, Dan’s the timid, reserved family man), who are about to close an international business deal with the Japanese that would be the culmination of 30 years of their work together. At the same time, Dan’s mysteriously long-lost love shows up with two kids – his – and wants him to be a part of their life again. No word on where or why she’s been gone for seven years, but no matter. Let’s not get confused with details. Seth Green is Ralph White, their young assistant, who goes at once from a young businessman hardly able to contain his enthusiasm to a total flake. [caption id="attachment_66217" align="alignleft" width="356" caption="Dan spending some quality time with his brand new kids."][/caption] He’s offered the career-starting opportunity of a lifetime – going to Japan to close the deal himself – and instantly blows it completely by arriving in Japan and immediately donning some bizarre costume and make-up at a karaoke bar and blowing the entire deal. What the hell? But ok, we get why he had to do that. Dan needs to be faced with the choice between being a father and closing the deal of a lifetime so the movie can have a point, so maybe the writers were just too tired to come up with anything interesting so instead they just scribbled out that karaoke scene. Possibly the same reason they got the kids so outrageously wrong. I’m no expert on children’s psychology, but how often does it happen that kids meet their father for the first time when they’re seven or eight years old and immediately start calling him daddy like he’s never been gone? Maybe a little confusion or discomfort was more than the already depressing material could sustain. [caption id="attachment_66218" align="alignright" width="373" caption="Seth Green, John Travolta, and Robin Williams had to bust this lock to find anything funny in Old Dogs."][/caption] But enough about the story. We’ve all seen Jumanji and Mrs. Doubtfire, so we know about Robin Williams as the most sensitive and emotional father in the history of mankind. He goes through those same motions here. John Travolta just isn’t taking himself seriously, and neither is his wife Kelly Preston, who plays Williams’ wife in the movie. Also keep your eye out for the late Bernie Mac, who appears only briefly but surely could be remembered in better ways. No one in the movie is really feeling it, and neither was I, but the bigger problem was the endless stream of wildly unamusing scenes. The opening scene features Charlie telling a lot of Japanese businessmen a personal and embarrassing story about Dan, and we’re supposed to laugh at the part where the Japanese guys all start laughing hysterically at the wrong part. Dan gets trapped in a shower at the spa and screams in pain as the dumbass woman working there flirts with Charlie. More than three decades in comedy and Robin Williams is still doing this crap. [caption id="attachment_66219" align="alignleft" width="388" caption="Ok, so get this. The car trunk is the movie, the woman is the audience, and Robin Williams is himself, reacting to the movie's public reception. Get it?"][/caption] And did a single person anywhere on earth reveal the slightest hint of a chuckle when the woman got her hands slammed in the car trunk? Are we supposed to find her agonized screams funny because she’s crossing her eyes? My god! That scene was so unfunny that while I was pondering it I missed the whole reason for why Charlie and Dan get saddled with taking care of the kids. Not that that matters. Dan gets forced to choose between his life-long company and the family that he never knew he had. Meanwhile Charlie hits on more women half his age. One scene in a restaurant couples this with the whole staff spontaneously singing the Happy Happy Senior Citizen song to him. I couldn’t decide which was less funny. A golfing trip, needless to say, results in a lot of guys getting hit in the balls with golfballs, but at least they left out the helium. Soon Charlie, Dan and Ralph get stuck in the gorilla enclosure at the zoo in the movie’s funniest scene. Dan decides the best thing to do is to beat his chest and roar like a gorilla, Charlie inexplicably starts barking like a dog, and Seth Green starts to scream like a girl. It was this screaming, in fact, that stopped a lot of the snoring that I was hearing around me in the theater. Okay, maybe I’m being a little harsh, it’s just that I think we have all come to expect so much more from a movie with such talent involved. I can’t say that I would call Seth Green a great comic actor, but he’s not bad, and both Robin Williams and John Travolta have such great things to their names that I can’t imagine the sequence of events that led to them agreeing to take part in such a moronic film. It’s not low-brow humor, and it’s not even slapstick, it’s crapstick! The Bean Meter