Better Man is a film based on Robbie Williams’ life. His songs were everywhere (in the UK at least) in the late 90s and early 00s. The title of the film is a song on his album Sing When You’re Winning, which I still listen to occasionally. I was never a super fan and I didn’t like Take That, but he’s definitely a personality and you’d think a biopic would be worth watching. I had mixed feelings about this film. It was too long, by at least half an hour, but that is my complaint about a lot of new films. It didn’t really have a strong storyline, and what story there was, I found predictable because I’d recently seen a BBC documentary about boy bands which featured Robbie and the rest of Take That. The style of the film reminded me of Rocketman, with short musical scenes quickly whirling into others. It wasn’t as good as Rocketman, though, or Bohemian Rhapsody, or Elvis, or any other musical biopic I’ve seen. Robbie Williams just isn’t as interesting, iconic or musically talented as these. I didn’t think it was a bad film, though. It worked very hard to engage our emotions and there was a lot of attention to detail. What I really want to discuss is the monkey.

The question is not ‘why is Robbie Williams a monkey?’ He has described himself as a performing monkey. Presenting him as a monkey – actually, a chimp – is a different perspective and indeed gives people something to talk about. The question is actually ‘would Better Man be a Better Movie if he was a man instead of a monkey?’ I was thinking about this, because I found the CGI monkey face distracting. It was a magic spell which diverted my attention from the weaknesses in the film. I found myself wondering how much of the $110 million budget was spent on monkey-fying (is that a word?) the figure of actor Jonno Davies. I also considered that we didn’t see monkey-Robbie sleep with anyone because that would be too bizarre. We do see him hoover up a lot of coke though. That a monkey is exhibiting this behaviour is very disturbing, which is perhaps the idea? The scene that disturbed me the most was when he plays Knebworth and the thousands of screaming fans morph into a lot of other monkeys which represent his inner critics. Temporarily we seem to be in a Planet of the Apes apocalyptic film as Robbie murders the monkeys, including himself as a child. That is definitely a scene which couldn’t be done with humans.

I have to conclude that the film is better with monkeys. Without monkeys, there wouldn’t be anything special about it. Whether the monkey element is a gimmick or not, at least it gets people curious about the film and perhaps it has brought Robbie Williams some new fans.