‘Death to Smoochy’ Movie Review

Death to Smoochy came out in 2002 when I had three kids under three and was expecting my fourth. I was in the thick of parenting little kids, which meant I was at my most familiar with children’s television programming. Danny DeVito’s dark look at the seedy underbelly of that industry seemed like one of the funniest things to me, so I was genuinely intrigued to see what my reaction would be decades later and far removed from that period of my life. While it doesn’t hold up as quite the piece of prime entertainment I remember, Death to Smoochy still has some legitimate laughs.

When Rainbow Randolph (Robin Williams) gets arrested for using his position as a popular children’s host to bribe parents, producer Nora Wells (Catherine Keener) is tasked with finding his replacement. Her boss, Marion Stokes (Jon Stewart), tells her that whoever the new host needs to be squeaky clean, and in her search, she stumbles across Sheldon Mopes (Edward Norton), whose children’s persona, Smoochy, seems to be tailor-made for this position.

The start of the film is its strongest point. The first 45 minutes or so are solidly funny and subversive in ways that absolutely still made me laugh. The realization that the charity group run by Merv Green (Harvey Fierstein) is actually just a money laundering scheme is hilarious in the black comedy way that one would expect from the rest of the film. The fight between the corporate overlords looking to use Smoochy to market sugar and toys to kids and Mopes with his unrelenting optimism about doing good in the world is a fun contrast that still manages to have a decent amount of relevance 20 years later.

Death to Smoochy starts to lose a little bit of steam going into the back half. Robin Williams’ comedy was always a little hit or miss for me, and while he has a lot of truly funny moments as Rainbow Randolph, the longer the film goes, the more off the rails he gets and the more unfortunate the content becomes. That’s when the script runs into the predictable homophobia that plagued so many early 2000s movies. And ultimately, the longer the film goes, the more it starts dragging. At nearly two hours, this comedy could have easily stood to trim some material from the back half.

For the most part, the performances in this are solid. Coming off of Fight Club, Norton does a great turn as the loveable, principled Smoochy, providing an idealized version of what we hope a children’s host would look like. Opposite him is Williams, the grizzled, cynical version of what any industry can do to someone if they never look outside of it. He brings his chaotic energy to this role, which results in a sometimes hilarious and sometimes cringy performance. Williams always shone brightest when there were some guardrails around his performance, and Death to Smoochy has none of those guardrails.

The supporting cast is a bit of a mish-mash of good and passable performances. Keener is probably the standout of the supporting cast, playing the jaded network executive, though Fierstein as the heavy for the children’s charity organization was funny in his brief appearances. For the most part, however, most of the additional characters detract from the primary story about the rivalry between Smoochy and Rainbow Randolph.

Ultimately, that’s where Death to Smoochy falls short. The film feels like a satire about how studios and time can chip away at the creative desires of people in media, leading them further away from their ideals toward the cesspool of money and power. However, the rivalry between Smoochy and Rainbow Randolph is almost entirely one-sided, and we rarely get to see them together, which mutes the efficacy of the two characters. If there had been more direct competition or even simple interaction between them, the message could have been strengthened. Instead, it gets bogged down in a side story focusing on the mob and a child-like boxer who has taken one too many hits to the head, leaving what could be a biting satire a bit toothless.

Watching Death to Smoochy left me with some mixed feelings. The movie’s pacing is off, the story is uneven, and the overall themes are muddled. But watching it absolutely reminded me how much I loved this film when I was neck-deep in Barney and Blue’s Clues and needed to laugh about the filthy underbelly of children’s programming, imagined or otherwise. It’s always fun to revisit Robin Williams’s filmography, even when it’s some of his lower-quality work. And it’s great to harken back to a day when being caught performing in front of the flag of a tyrannical despot was seen as a bad thing.