What’s Robin Williams been up to recently? Well, on the big screen, the answer is not an awful lot. Last year he popped up briefly in episodes of “Wilfred” and “Louie,” and the year before he voiced a couple of characters in “Happy Feet Two.” However, you have to go back to 2009’s trio of the really rather good “World’s Greatest Dad,” the distinctly average “Night at the Museum 2” and the all kinds of awful “Old Dogs” to get anything significant from Williams on the big screen. That all looks set to change though with “The Big Wedding” and “The Butler” (in which he’ll play a priest and a president, respectively) both looking set for release this year, with “The Angriest Man in Brooklyn” already in the can, and now Williams has another project lined up.
The Oscar winner (and four time nominee) has joined Dito Montiel’s “Boulevard,” which will be the “A Guide To Recognizing Your Saints” director’s fifth feature and follow-up to the recently wrapped “Empire State.” Williams will play a character named Nolan Mack, who is a devoted husband forced to confront his secrets after encountering an emotionally-closed young man called Leo (played by relative unknown Roberto Aguire). The script has been penned by Douglas Soesbe (whose most recent credit was the TV movie “Look Again” starring Morena Baccarin) and is described as an intimate drama about marriage and lies.
Just a brief look at the two casts suggests that this is a change of pace for Montiel, whose "Empire State" stars Dwayne Johnson and Liam Hemsworth and follows a pair of childhood friends who plan to rob an armored car depository and the NYPD officer who stands against them. However, both projects sound interesting, and it’s certainly nice to see Williams getting a meaty lead role (considering how good he was last time out in the aforementioned "World’s Greatest Dad"). What we would like to see though is Williams go down the straight comedy route again, and not in some nonsense like "Old Dogs" but on a project that has other legitimately talented people attached to it. For now though, just seeing more of Williams than we have in the last few years will have to be good enough.