Cinema: Bicentennial Man

STARRING: Robin Williams, Embeth Davidtz, Sam Neill, Oliver Platt, Hallie Kate Eisenberg DIRECTOR: Chris Columbus OPENS: Dec. 17

To love your mechanical playmate is an agreeable, G-rated notion; that's Toy Story. To want to have sex with it: that's the premise of Robin Williams' latest foray into ickiness. As Andrew, the robot with a heart, he beguiles the family that buys him in the year 2005. Beneath the plastic casing, he is really a middle-aged gentleman, sweet of disposition, wryly amusing, sympathetic to women--hey, is this guy gay? Not at all: Andrew wants the love of a good woman. Davidtz plays his first keeper-girlfriend and her granddaughter, who is eager to touch the soul of this machine.

The result isn't quite as awful as you'd expect from the star of Patch Adams and the director of Stepmom, 1998's most tasteless glops of Christmas treacle. Williams restrained is a tad more endurable than Williams rampant. But in this uneasy mix of noble aphorisms and fart jokes, the tone is cloying, the running time bloated. Will someone in the near future please invent a Robin Williams movie worth sitting through?

--R.C.