‘Better Man’ Review: They Made A Monkey Out Of Robbie Williams – Remember Him?

The first certified bomb of 2025 involves a were-creature, but it is not Wolf Man, believe it or not. No, I am not talking about wolves. I’m talking about an ape, sort of, one that is more CGI monstrosity than beast.

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Better Man is the season’s latest musical following Mufasa and Wicked (and also Joker: Folie a Deux if you seriously want to count it). The former is also the newest pop star biopic of a Brit, riding the coattails of Rocket Man and Bohemian Rhapsody a couple of years too late.

It chronicles the career of Robbie Williams, a charismatic hitmaker and ruffian who hasn’t had a substantial hit in over 20 years. In the US, his biggest splash was “Millennium,” which parallelled the turn of the last century and made him important enough to justify a duet with Nicole Kidman nobody recalls.

If anyone who remembers him, or those songs, saw this movie, they are out of luck as they never get to see his face or those of the actors playing him. For the entire film, Williams is rendered as a talking animated chimp for superficial reasons.

They try to explain it – he is a “cheeky monkey,” he feels like a trained circus animal inside, he thinks of himself as “less evolved” – but the idea never makes sense. In the movie, Williams is a chimp from birth and that’s the way it is, barely acknowledged.

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All this creative decision does is give Better Man an excuse for some CGI and excess flair. It adds nothing to the story or the experience, and gets distracting before long. When your movie is over two hours, that’s a problem.

The pathos and performances are strong enough to carry it, even if you have seen the same basic story several times, but they are hampered by this interminable visual stunt that plays like a poor man’s Kafka. Except, instead of a bug’s life, you have a monkey on your back trying to steal the show.

Regardless, I give credit to the effects house WETA for doing an impressive job with the design of the ape. They might win an Oscar and good for them. If there are people dumb enough to throw $100 million at you for something that should only cost a tenth of that, you might as well take the money and run.

Stash it for a rainy day. Peter Jackson could try to make another Hobbit movie or Mortal Engines (you never know).

No studio is a stranger to throwing cash at something they think is a sure thing, only to stare down the barrel of disappointment. I guess they thought the musical numbers and occasional gay imagery and overtones would get the same crowd Wicked reeled in, but no, it didn’t happen.

I can report firsthand that no one aside from me showed up to see Better Man when I went. In fact, attendance must have been so far below expectations that they didn’t care enough to turn up the heat in the theater. I sat, with a deep freeze outside, in a chilly AMC, trying not to fall asleep.

That’s the whole truth, but I won’t call Robbie Williams boring. He’s led a compelling life full of drama, shocking moments, and the usual ups and downs of stardom. It’s just that no one took into account if he had the popularity left to make this ship sail, or if replacing his face with a monkey’s was the right promotional move.

But, on the bright side, at least we DC fans know what a Detective Chimp musical could be like.

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