Film Review: Better Man

For UK millennials no artist probably encapsulates their youth like Robbie Williams. The cooler kids might claim it was all about Oasis, but mostly they’re looking back through Liam Gallagher tinted glasses. Williams straddled both the cheesy world of boybands and somehow the epoch of ‘cool Britania,’ through a mixture of catchy songs, cheeky humour and an Elton John level of drug use. 

In some respects, Better Man is a very much a play-by-numbers story you have seen played out a dozen times already. The story is very simple and if you imagine the plot of a stereotypical music biopic and you’ll have about 90% of it. However, a sprinkling of (northern) British humour, a large CGI monkey and a heavy lean into fantasy takes these typical story beats and makes something fantastical from them.

Robbie Williams, himself, narrates in part and is primarily where the majority of the films’ humour comes from giving mischievous asides throughout his story. This does start to taper away around the mid-point, much to the film’s detriment, but more on that later.

One can't even begin to imagine how director Michael Gracey sold the CGI chimp angle to the studio. However, creatively, it hugely pays off adding not just a great deal of physicality to many of the film’s sequences, but lets the story deftly move between fantasy and reality. With vibrant set pieces that can shift from a sold-out concert to bloody medieval battlefield within moments, it's unlikely the film could work any other way. 

Jonathan Davies, who provided the voice and motion-capture, performance comfortably rivals that of Andy Serkis,’ Gollum. Managing to encapsulate not just Williams’ mannerisms, but also his charisma, no small feat when having to work with a chimp’s facial features and enlarged teeth.

The film is packed with other good performances: Damion Herriman, is delightfully odious as Take That’s manager, and Raechelle Banno as All Saints bandmember and Robbie girlfriend, Nicole Appleton, manages to scrape out a role as something a little more than ‘star’s girlfriend.’ Her mid-film dance to ‘She’s the One,’ is also literally breath-taking and could cause motion-sickness to the faint-of-stomach just watching. 

Unfortunately, Steve Pemberton as Robbie’s father needed to show something more of a redeemable side to sell the film's ending. However, he’s good at portraying the narcissistic blueprint Robbie clearly mirrored. Everyone else is pretty much window dressing. It’s not that any of the actors are bad, it's just they aren’t given a ton to work with as the film doesn’t really care about their past character motivation. For example, the film never really gives you enough information to take away real names or facts of people surrounding Robbie Williams at the time.

While there is a lot to recommend the film there are some issues. After about the first 30 minutes the film's tone/events become increasingly mawkish and depressing. If one was to judge the strength of a biopic on how willing it is to delve into negative parts of the subject’s past, the film is grade-A titanium. Williams flagellates himself throughout. He leaves no stone unturned showing his self-loathing, the relationships he destroyed, his rampant drug and alcohol use. While Williams may nod towards his child-hood he makes it clear that it was still all him who did these things and he’s the one to blame. It’s a very honest and raw account – it also gets a bit much.

At a certain point, Robbie starts seeing angry chimp versions of himself in the audience, threatening him. As his various mental health issues grow, he starts to see more and more of them. Not only does this device get heavily over-used, every time it does Robbie briefly falters as he has to overcome his inner-demons/inner-apes. This is particularly annoying as it stops the flow/performance of the movie's songs which is a large part of why people go to see music biopics in the first place.  

That said the film is visually spectacular, poignant, funny and features some legitimately great (if interrupted) songs. If you’re a fan of Robbie Williams you’re going to love it, but even if you just like films taking big swings and (mostly) hitting you’re going to find plenty to enjoy. Better Man is still showing in cinemas, but if you want to catch it you may wish to hurry. While the use of a CGI chimp may have been a bold creative choice it seems to have been a poor box-office one ($8 million recouped on a $110 million budget so far – yikes) and might not be around for long.