I was over at a friend’s house the other day and saw that she had rented Man of the Year, a 2006 movie starring Robin Williams, Laura Linney, and Christopher Walken. I hadn’t seen the film yet, so I accepted my friend’s invitation to stay and watch it with her. All I knew about the movie was that it was billed as a comedy, so I prepared myself to laugh.

Man of the Year started out very well. Williams plays a political talk show host named Tom Dobbs who makes his living by complaining about the shoddy job that the current politicians are doing. Then one night during his opening routine, a woman in the audience stands up and says all the pols are so bad that Dobbs himself should run. He’d get her vote for sure. The rest of the audience is very receptive to the idea, but Dobbs just kind of laughs it off.

But the American people won’t let the notion drop. From emails to blog posts, the idea just keeps picking up steam and getting more and more momentum. Finally, after consulting with longtime advisor Jack Menken (played by Walken), Dobbs officially decides to throw his hat into the ring.

At the same time that this is going on, we meet a woman named Eleanor Green (Linney) who works at a company that recently secured a deal to supply electronic voting machines for the upcoming election. Eleanor discovers a potential glitch in the system and alerts her boss Hemmings (Rick Roberts) to the problem. Hemmings doesn’t want to do anything to jeopardize the upswing in the company’s stock price, so he tells Eleanor that there’s no problem at all.

It turns out that Dobbs’s grassroot support and unorthodox approach to politics strikes a chord with the voting public, and he wins the election. Or does he? Eleanor is convinced that the glitch in the voting machine software led to Dobbs’s improbable victory. She tests out her theory and is indeed correct.

From this point forward, Man of the Year became pretty unwatchable for me. It devolved into a predictable “thriller” in which the Hemmings and his evil henchmen try to silence Eleanor (who of course is forced into hiding) before she can get to Dobbs and explain the truth.

My Reaction: I think director Barry Levinson made a major miscalculation with this project. Man of the Year might have worked as a comedy or as a thriller, but to try to combine the genres was a huge mistake. The result was a movie that suffered from an identity crisis and sent mixed messages to viewers.

Don’t bother trying to apply logic to the script or you will end up getting even more frustrated with how much time you wasted on the film. For example, you won’t want to ask yourself how Eleanor was able to walk right up to the President-elect at a private party by impersonating an FBI agent, or why Dobbs would even bother talking to this potentially crazy person. And don’t ask yourself why Eleanor had to go to Dobbs himself to explain the problem with the voting machines when it would have been far easier to contact a major media outlet.

Overall, I give Man of the Year 2 stars out of 5 and advise you to stay away from this one!