Man of the Year (PG-13, 2006)

In MAN OF THE YEAR, Robin Williams stars as Tom Dobbs, a TV host a la The Daily Show's Jon Stewart who jokes about running for president. One day during the warm up before his show, an audience member challenges Dobbs to actually run -- next thing you know, he's a major candidate and then, unbelievably, president. Turns out that a computer glitch in the voting process results in Dobbs' win. An evil software company has sold the United States on a national voting system -- but just weeks before the election, computer analyst Eleanor Green (Laura Linney) discovers an anomaly that company legal counsel Alan Stewart (Jeff-Goldblum) will do just about anything to keep secret.

Man of the Year starts out as a comedy, but somewhere along the way, it turns into a conspiracy thriller. Unfortunately, it really can't decide what it wants to be -- All the President's Men, Wag the Dog, or Bulworth. If Williams had been given the chance to do any real comedy, this could have been a really funny movie, but the plot spirals into a sub-par thriller. And a subplot involving a romance between Dobbs and Green doesn't work at all.

If the filmmakers were going to take the thriller route, why not throw a few issues into the mix -- war, terrorists, something! As it is, this is a milquetoast movie that doesn't play on any of its actors' strengths, including Linney, the formidable Christopher Walken, who plays Dobbs' chain-smoking manager, and irascible Daily Show regular Lewis Black, who plays his curmudgeonly head-writer.

Studio: Universal Pictures
Director: Barry Levinson
Cast: Christopher Walken, Laura Linney, Robin Williams
Genre: Comedy
Run time: 115 minutes
Theatrical release: October 12, 2006
DVD release: February 20, 2007
MPAA Rating: PG-13
MPAA explanation: language, including some crude sexual references, drug related material, and brief violence.