Better Man (2024)

SPOILERS BELOW

There might be some metaphorical reasoning behind portraying Williams as an anthropomorphised chimp in this - he's a performing monkey, an animal, a cheeky chap - or even pragmatism - it removes the distraction of using multiple actors and how much they each look like Williams - but I suspect the real reason is that they realised their script has no depth or subtlety and they needed to zhuzh it up a bit somehow. Making it into a jukebox musical of almost exclusively Williams' songs certainly doesn't help because, as this film lays embarrassingly bare for anyone who hadn't really been paying attention before now, they're all a bit samey and bland with painfully mundane lyrics and not really suitable to hang a story off.
The plot is pretty much 'witless mugging dickhead gets famous, does lots of drugs and upsets a few people, goes to rehab and fixes everything', there's really not much more to it than that. Any attempt at characterisation is delivered bluntly and repeatedly. Did you know that Robbie Williams only cares about getting attention and that he's sad his dad abandoned him? You will after two hours of being told that directly over and over again. "You're a nobody!" shouts a fellow player during a childhood game of backstreet football, like no ten year old did ever. "You're talentless!" shout his inner demons, who are also chimps and which he will literally struggle with in a big fight sequence then defeat at the end of the film by winning them round with a passable cover of My Way in a happy ending so cheesy and unearned I thought it was going to turn out to be an overdose hallucination.
Even when it pulls out the big guns and shows Williams accompanying his fiancée to an abortion clinic or contemplating a suicide attempt, it's difficult to care because it's all done via yet another heavy-handed fantasy sequence. Is this Robbie Williams holding a blade to his wrist, or is it a super-chimp in an apocalyptic snowscape?
In one particularly bad bit of writing, Williams says something like "Then there were the gay sex rumours. All the blokes I shagged said I was crap! I didn't mind that they said I shagged them. I just didn't like them telling people I was rubbish!" They take as many sentences to explain the tired old joke as they do to tell it. The film is as desperate for attention and undignified in its attempts to get it as Williams himself.
It lays its cards on the table in the final moment, as Robbie looks into the camera and says "yeah, I'm cabaret, but I'm fucking good cabaret. Fuck off." This is not bravura storytelling, this is the cinematic equivalent of William's appearance on Parkinson: artless noise in place of having anything interesting to say.

Rating: mugging and witless