Robo flop

Robin Williams plays a robot who becomes human in his latest comedy. Peter Bradshaw says enough is enough

Followers of the career of Mr Robin Williams - and the stunned and traumatised professional witnesses in the cinema auditorium - have detected no obvious lack of self-esteem in the great man. Each of his recent comedic offerings has, in its own distinctively spine-chilling way, been remarkable. There was Patch Adams, in which Mr Williams suggested that gravely ill children can be cured by the healing power of laughter. Then there was Jakob the Liar, a sort of Mork-in-Auschwitz turn from Robin, about how the Jews in the Polish ghetto awaiting deportation to the death camps were able to keep their peckers up on account of Mr Williams's gregarious flights of iridescent fancy - rather than, say, because of their religious faith.

Now, with his comedy Bicentennial Man, Robin has topped everything. He's gone one shattering step beyond. When the house lights came up at the end, the audience I was in just sat there, slack-jawed with silent horror, like the man in Edvard Munch's The Scream. I am virtually having to write this on an IV drip. Because Robin plays a cute android robot - that face dismayingly recognisable, though cased in metal - serving as a household butler in the year 2005, in whom manufacturing blips have induced lovely, quirky human character traits that make this cyber-Jeeves simply adorable. But he lives for ever, being a robot, and has to see all the people he loves, and who love him, grow old and die. This makes him real sad.

Eventually, at the end of 200 long, long years, Robin has gained a sleek, realistic ultra hi-tech latex face and the great-granddaughter of his original owner falls in love with him, and just for her, Robin has a quasi-human corporeal obsolescence hard-wired into him so that, wrinkled and snowy-haired at last, they can shuffle off this mortal coil together on a his'n'hers death bed. That's right, everyone. He renounces his immortality for humanity: for you and me .

The time has come to admit the truth: Robin Williams is the Antichrist of sentimental screen comedy. At the beginning of the picture, it all seemed so modest, just a little household drama. Sam Neill unveils this tin helpmeet to his suspicious family, and Robin starts clanking hilariously around, his limbs making those hydraulic whirring noises as he puckishly questions authority. The brattish daughter com mands him to throw himself out of an upstairs window; he instantly obeys, and then comes back in through the front door - but his motor functions are all screwed up! This is the cue for a bravura display of unfunny robotic acting from Robin: eyes blinking out of synch, jerking round, buzzy voice. It's a masterclass in being supremely irritating.

A word about Robin's metal facial expressions. Basically, these denotations of sweetness, compassion, sorrow, and impish mischief, are all achieved by having his metal eyebrows arch quizzically upwards. This is unfortunate because it actually has the effect of underscoring how robotic Robin's expressions are in reality.

As time goes on, Robin the sweetly non-paranoid android is allowed to make money making and selling wooden handicrafts, and then wants to buy his freedom from the master of the house. This is met primarily with gruff refusal, and perhaps it is some tiny unexpected restraint which stops director Chris Columbus putting a tin whistle rendition of Dixie on the soundtrack here. But, eventually, he's allowed his freedom, because the grown-up children shout things like: "He's every bit as complex as we are!"

The real moment of horror arrives when technical innovations mean that Robin, who has hitherto had only a smooth Action Man-type groin, is allowed to be a "com plete" man. So he is allowed to get it on with Portia, his one true love. In the afterglow of robot-human love-making, they lie in one another's arms, and Robin farts, and they both giggle, babes in the post-coital wood. It is the kind of heart-warming, life-affirming moment that made me want to put my fist in my mouth and bite it off. (The mechanics of sex are shrouded in mystery, incidentally: Robin has gastric juices to digest food, so he presumably has other juices, with the usual consequences. A sort of Bride of Chucky situation? One very much hopes not.)

And, all the while, 200 years go by, with no obvious historical upheavals such as war or plague, just futuristic cars whizzing over tall buildings in establishing shots. So Robin bestrides time and fate like a colossus, transcending the human condition, only to make a magnificent gesture for love.

What next for Robin Williams? Perhaps, with a large moustache, he could be Friedrich Nietzsche, sobbing and embracing that horse in the final scene with many an acid quip. Or maybe he could portray Stephen Hawking's tragic decline from walking stick to motorised wheelchair, that uproarious routine buzzing out of the voicebox, using laughter as a solvent for the unified field theory. But I have a horrible feeling that great, mobile lantern-jawed face will not come seraphically to rest until it is framed by a crown of thorns.