Only enormously talented people could have made Death to Smoochy. Those with lesser gifts would have lacked the nerve to make a film so bad, so miscalculated, so lacking any connection with any possible audience. To make a film this awful, you have to have enormous ambition and confidence, and dream big dreams.
The movie, directed by Danny DeVito (!), is about two clowns. That violates a cardinal rule of modern mass entertainment, which is that everyone hates clowns almost as much as they hate mimes. ( Big Fat Liar, a much better recent showbiz comedy, got this right. When the clown arrives at a birthday party, the kids joyfully shouts, Hey, it s the clown! Let s hurt him! ) Most clowns are simply tiresome (I exempt Bozo). There are however two dread categories of clowns: clowns who are secretly vile and evil, and clowns who are guileless and good. Death to Smoochy takes no half-measures and provides us with one of each.