It’s only two weeks into the new year and we already have our first box office bomb. BETTER MAN, the biopic about pop music bad boy Robbie Williams is a complete bust. The film, which opened on Xmas Day in the US and on Boxing Day in the UK, has only taken in about US$10 million so far, which is a far cry from its US$110 million production budget and the US$25 million Paramount shelled out to acquire it. Some pundits are saying that its poor performance is not surprising given that Williams isn’t very well known to North American audiences but even in the UK where Williams holds the record for the most BRIT awards, and has sold more than 20 million albums and almost 10 million singles, half of that $10 million comes from there. That’s pretty dismal on its own. Reviews of the film have been positive so what’s the deal? Hong Kong audiences are about to see and judge for themselves.

BETTER MAN traces the singer’s meteoric rise from the time he was a lad in working-class Stoke-on-Trent to becoming a global superstar. At an early age, he knows he wants to entertain people, just as his father is doing but, unlike his father, young Robert wants to be famous. At 15, he lands his first professional gig as a member of the fledgling boy band, Take That, but he quickly realises that his role there is to be nothing more than a backup singer and dancer for the band’s appointed star and songwriter Gary Barlow. Plagued with thoughts of never being enough, a theme that runs through the whole movie, Williams turns to drugs and alcohol which leads to his expulsion from the band. A year later, he launches his solo career, and although he has earned a reputation for being a narcissistic twat (by his own admission), he still rockets to fame with his first album, “Life Thru a Lens” that includes such hits as “Angels” and “Let Me Entertain You”.

Williams himself narrates the tale and he doesn’t hold back on his feelings towards some of the people he worked with early on in his career including Barlow. But BETTER MAN is neither your straight up biopic like BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY nor is it a fever dream like ROCKETMAN. Here, Williams appears as an anthropomorphic chimpanzee. It’s a huge swing for co-writer, director and producer Michael Gracey (THE GREATEST SHOWMAN) and it generally works as Williams sees himself as a cheeky, lesser evolved primate, although it should be noted that chimpanzees are just as evolved as humans. While the chimp is played by actors Carter J. Murphy as a child and Jonno Davies (BEN-HUR) as an adult, both of whom do a great job making audiences quickly forget that they’re watching motion-capture CGI, new versions of Williams’ hits are performed by vocal soundalike Adam Tucker, although Williams does sing along on a few tracks.

For the most part, BETTER MAN is very entertaining though the second half of the film does lose some of its steam as the story gets more into Williams’ drug abuse and subsequent rehabilitation and self-analysis. I found it interesting that one of his big beefs with Barlow was that he and the other Take That band members were making chump change while Barlow was reaping the lion’s share of the income as the group’s songwriter. Nevertheless, once Williams was recording his own music and making millions off of it, he did the same thing to his collaborator, Guy Chambers. So yes, he was and might still be a narcissistic twat. Either way though, it’s hard to dispute that he’s one terrific entertainer as anyone who has seen him in concert can attest to.

BETTER MAN opens in Hong Kong on Thursday (January 16th). If you’re a Robbie Williams fan or even Robbie-curious, you will enjoy this film. If you’re not, you might find the conceit a bit bananas.

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