Leave Well-Enough Alone. Please.

Here we go…

Who doesn’t have Robin Williams memories? I remember watching Mork and Mindy as a little kid. Heck, I had the suspenders. He was an unique talent with a bright, sharp, quick wit and explosive energy that refused to stay confined to a script. It’s been ten years since he’s been gone, and he’s still sadly missed. There will never be another like him.

As we all know, the last time Robin Williams was seen on the screen was in the third Night At the Museum movie, in which he played Teddy Roosevelt. His final words were, “Smile, my boy. It’s sunrise,” in a lovely, bittersweet moment of farewell.

If only those could have been the last words the much-loved Mr. Williams said onscreen, but they weren’t. Oh no. Robin Williams’s actual last movie was a real stinker. I mean, a real stinker. I didn’t know this going in, and I wish I didn’t know it now. Normally I wear my Bad Movie Queen crown proudly, but at the moment it’s kind of embarrassing.

I am talking about, unfortunately, the 2015 movie, Absolutely Anything, in which Mr. Williams plays a talking dog named Dennis. The movie was written by Terry Jones of Monty Python fame, Gavin Scott of Young Indiana Jones Chronicles fame, and, posthumously, Douglas Adams of Hitchhiker’s Guide To the Galaxy fame. It also stars all the surviving members of the Monty Python troupe, including my favorite, Michael Palin.

Things open with Neil (Simon Pegg), a supremely ordinary teacher who dreams of writing a best-seller and winning over his downstairs neighbor, Catherine (Kate Beckinsale), who works at the BBC. He’d also the headmaster (Eddie Izzard) of his school to actually be nice to him.

No one in Neil’s life seems to be doing very well. His friend and fellow teacher, Ray (Sanjeev Bhaskar) wishes Miss Pringle (Emma Pierson), the physical education teacher, would look his way instead of giving him the brush all the time. Catherine, meanwhile, spends her days fending off her extremely creepy producer, James (Robert Bathurst) and Grant (Rob Riggle), an American intelligence officer who claims to be Catherine’s fiancee even though they only had one date. Both of these guys are seriously delusional.

Meanwhile, a group of aliens in a spaceship that looks oddly like a jellyfish, or Freudian, depending on where one’s mind is, decide to test humanity to see if it’s worth saving. They don’t say it, but I got major “We’re going to blow up the Earth for a new intergalactic bypass,” vibes from this crowd like a certain other sci-fi saga we can mention.

After flipping through what can only be described as an alien Rolodex, this group lands on a picture of Neil and decide to grant him absolute power. All he has to do is wave his hand and speak whatever he wants or doesn’t want into existence.

Well, when Neil starts using his new powers, he’s understandably shocked, and who can blame him? Suddenly, some notes Dennis ate are restored and intact, the poop Dennis left gets up and walks spryly off to the toilet, where it somehow flushes by itself. Yes. Poop. I wish I were kidding.

Neil hits the bottle pretty hard, and after spilling his whiskey, wishing it would go back into the bottle, and finding it now has old Cheerios in it, wishes he had more. To his horror, his empty whiskey bottle bounces out of the apartment, down the stairs and out into the street, where it makes a beeline for the nearest liquor store. Neil and Dennis follow, and Neil is aghast when the bottle throws itself through the liquor store’s locked front door.

Dude. You just saw poop walk, dance, skip, and off itself. Are you really that shocked that your bottle of single-malt whiskey is going boing boing down the street to the liquor store? Seriously?

After he and Dennis evade the cops, Neil realizes, “I can do absolutely everything.”

And he does. Suddenly Miss Pringle not only loves Ray, but forms a cult around him and stalks him. Neil not only gets Catherine’s attention, but finds he can spy on her. He wishes for a great body and gets it, at least temporarily. A lot of his wishes go really badly, and most of the time he has the sense to undo them right away, but it doesn’t always work.

And what of Dennis, played by our dearly departed Robin Williams? Neil wishes Dennis could speak, and the first word this dog utters is, “Biscuits.”

Other than some intelligent speech, Dennis is still a pretty typical dog, being unfailingly adoring of Neil and talking about doggy stuff, to the point that Catherine overhears him and thinks Neil is gay.

It only gets weirder and more uncomfortable, believe it or not. I only got ten minutes into the film before I was reaching for the chocolate, because Absolutely Anything is repulsive, dumb, awkward, haphazard and uncharacteristically bad, especially considering we know what the cast and writers are usually capable of. No one brought their A-game to this movie, or even their B- or C-games. There’s no saving of this movie. At all.

One of the things that makes Absolutely Anything tank in every way is the fact that these aliens are all about testing humanity to see if we’re intelligent enough to keep around, yet the power they grant Neil takes everything absolutely literally and doesn’t seem to understand basic English. If Neil wishes to be on a bus he finds himself inside the hood with the engine instead of in the passenger areas with the people. If he wishes to have a great body, what he initially gets is a woman’s physique instead of a man’s. In what universe is this considered good comedy?

Robin Williams recorded his dialogue for the film right before he passed away in August of 2014, so he obviously didn’t live to see its release. That’s probably a good thing. To be fair, though, his first movie, the 1977 sex joke anthology Can I Do It ‘Till I Need Glasses? was a terrible film as well, so in a way he came full circle with Absolutely Anything. To quote the actual last words Williams said in a movie, “Hey, nobody’s perfect.”

Yep, that’s for sure. There’s a reason Absolutely Anything got extremely poor reviews when it was released and is basically forgotten nowadays. I hope it stays that way. I don’t know about anyone else, but as far as I’m concerned, Robin Williams’s last movie is Night At the Museum: Secret Of the Tomb.

For more Screen Debuts and Last Hurrahs, please see the Classic Movie Blog Association website. Thanks for hosting this, all–it was great! Thanks for reading, and I hope to see you tomorrow for another post…

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