“Death To Smoochy”, despite it’s ‘outrageously mischievous’ façade, has, thumping away in its fuschia rubber chest, a heart about as tough as a banana after a six-week sojourn in the trunk of a car. During the first few minutes of this insipid cartoon you realize that the only shock you’re likely to suffer will come when one of the leads finally stumbles over a good joke. There is enough material here to suggest that somewhere along the line a real diamond-cutter of a script was slowly eviscerated into the mess that was finally released; this doesn’t change the fact that ‘Smoochy’ is to black comedies what The Family Circus is to The Simpsons. And the guilty parties? DeVito, Williams, Norton, Keener, Feirstein? Surely there should be something written into the Geneva Convention about wasting this much talent.
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