Poignant perhaps. But still poor.

Perhaps we should not speak ill of the dead. But had the sad demise of Robin Williams not happened, then this movie would have been consigned to the ever growing pile of lame comedies that became the latter part of Williams' career (the repeated failures of which at the box office might perhaps go some way toward explaining his paralleled decline in personal self-worth). From the mighty triumphs of movies like Mrs Doubtfire, Insomnia and Good Morning Vietnam, one need only cast an eye over his IMDb list of output in the last 10 years. Ask yourself... have you even heard of most of these movies (let alone seen them)?

I watched The Angriest Man in Brooklyn on a plane just a few days after Robin Williams passed away. The real life parallels to the predicament of a man apparently on a stopwatch to the hereafter (brain aneurysym in the movie versus apparent real-life Parkinsons), and taking stock of what he has achieved are perhaps, given the events that ultimately played out in real life, the most appealing part of this movie; a chance, for once, to take at face value the poignancy of yet another Robin Williams sentimentality-fest, albeit this time from the perspective of knowing what was to happen to the actor once the movie wrapped. As a movie in its own right, however, it is lumpen, flawed, unfunny, and Williams himself seems to know all these things. In only one scene (relaying the tale of his day so far to a police officer) do we see a glimmer of the Williams of old. For the rest of the movie it feels like he is being restrained, crushed almost, by the weighted expectation of the old magic that the viewer so wants to see again, but almost certainly knows has long since faded and died.

Williams was an actor of his time, who too often strayed into over-sentimentality in his choice of movies. He played, in many roles, the clichéd teary clown. But now the clown has gone forever, it is only the tears that remain.