656. Flubber (1997)

Starring: Robin Williams, Marcia Gay Harden, Christopher McDonald

Director: Les Mayfield

Running Time: 94 mins

Flubber is an American film about a mad professor, who, despite other commitments, discovers ‘flubber’, a magical green substance made of flying rubber that could be used as a new energy source.

This film may have a certain degree of charm to it, but it’s largely a pretty boring and repetitive affair. Even Robin Williams couldn’t really hold up this film, and despite his fun performance, this is a typically formulaic Disney movie that has little intelligence in any aspects.

One interesting thing that I find about this film is that it shows the stark difference between Disney’s animation and live-action studios during the 90s. While the studio was undergoing a spectacular renaissance in its animation studio throughout the decade, you had terrible live-action films like this, Honey I Shrunk The Kids and others.

Anyway, it’s difficult not to enjoy this film for its light-hearted charm and fun, but it’s also difficult to be at all interested in it due to its boring characters and extremely repetitive story.

I think that the main problem with this film, however, is the terrible characterisation. While Robin Williams’ character is meant to be wacky and unpredictable, he’s just the epitome of a cast of overly spontaneous and random characters. It’s as if every single one of them constantly changes their opinions and convictions at every point in the story, and that makes for an incredibly jumpy and idiotic story.

Also, the story is really boring. There’s a whole plot that follows a proper relationship, yet the format and intelligence of this film clearly shows it’s aimed at kids, meaning that you get this conflict between plots that neither generation can be interested in, adults couldn’t really care less about the flubber, while kids wouldn’t be at all interested in the relationship.

One thing that I was really impressed by in this was the special effects. With relatively complicated effects to pull off in 1997, this is a pretty cool-looking film, but despite that, it’s not that impressive, so that’s why it gets a 6.4 from me.