Review by st-shot

It would be a safe bet to claim mercurial funny man Robin Williams hasn't been funny since the last century. Age and stale material repackaged with the same zany but winded nuances stopped being amusing some time back. With a film career on life support Williams returns to the place where he got his start, stand-up, and promptly falls on his ass.

From the outset Williams sweats and shrinks before our eyes in a hallowed cavernous DC auditorium as he huffs and puffs his way about the stage with the same routine worn paper thin by decades of the same shtick on endless talk shows and incorporated into films that won him critical praise. In Destruction he leaps on today's topics with the same manic enthusiasm he did in his youth but the novelty and Puckish charm are long gone and instead we get a sloven heavily caffeinated, perspiring old man where the cutesy gets creepy.

Williamsis somewhere between Ork and Dangerfield and incapable of handling it with Rodney's unique savoir faire. It is a cringing performance to witness, made even more evident by the audience response where the only thing that brings down the house is the wistful sentimentality for this over the hill repetitive dinosaur who now has to resort to dick and pussy jokes to get forced laughs from hipsters as he enters and exits, albeit a decade or two too late.