By Emilio Frenk.
Director: Taylor Hackford
Cast: Robert De Niro, Leslie Mann, Danny De Vito, Edie Falco, Charles Grodin, Cloris Leachman, Patti LuPone, Gilbert Gottfried, Billy Crystal and Harvey Keitel.
Rating: Poor.
Academy Award Winner Taylor Hackford, joins forces with another Academy Award Winner Robert De Niro and a multitalented cast in “The Comedian” and this is indeed a huge disappointment.
The movie takes place in New York City in the life of Jackie Burke (Robert De Niro) a comic icon who was at the top of his game thanks to a character he played in his early career.
One day at a Comedy Club, Burke has an altercation with an audience member that costs him to go to prison.
After he is released he is forced to do community service where he will meet Harmony Schiltzstein (Leslie Mann) and his life will suffer a major turn leading to a friendship and romance.
“The Comedian” had everything to be a good movie. Like I mentioned before it has an A list cast and a remarkable director like Taylor Hackford but after the first act of the film everything went to a downward spiral.
The script written by Art Linson, Jeffrey Ross, Richard LaGravenese and Lewis Friedman was a complete mess when the Second Act of the film started. I was beginning to like the opening and I was seeing true potential.
The problem was after De Niro´s character has his first encounter with Danny De Vito´s character who plays his brother Jimmy. I could see here a man with a lot of conflict but at the same time the performances were over the top and the script had dialogue that was on the nose.
Taylor Hackford has directed memorables movie like “An Officer and a Gentleman”, “Dolores Claiborne” and “Ray” but here the main problem was that themovie not only was too long,but it was very slow.
The problem when you have four writers on board of a project is that it seems that they don´t know what they want and they just throw stuff on the page.
I did like the premise on how they portrayed an artist that has been labeled for a role and tries to revive his career, but the execution was very poor.
The script had the tendency of over explaining every situation where De Niro´s character was involved.
This a huge example where it doesn´t matter if you have an A list cast. The most important is to have a solid script since the cast won´t save the movie.
“The Comedian” like I mentioned previously is a movie that could have delivered the goods but this wasn´t the case and it was movie that was everything but funny.
With that being said, “The Comedian” is one of the biggest dissapointments of this year and I cannot recommend it.