When you consider that DeVito is not only one of our most entertaining actors ("Taxi," "Romancing the Stone," "Throw Momma from the Train") but has also directed some class acts like "Hoffa" and especially the biting and almost surreal "The War of the Roses," we may wonder what motivated him to put his name on such an irritating, abusive and actually pointless "satire" as "Death to Smoochy" which sets up a straw man (children's shows, or all subjects) and knocks it down. If his aim in using Adam Resnick's unsubtle script is to parody the genre the way other productions such as "Quiz Show" have taken aim on the corruption behind the TV games, where is a shred of evidence that such activity exists behind the scenes?

The big problem here is that the film is dumbed-down, patronizing an imagined audience that would not be able to sit still and pay attention unless Anastas Michos' camera used the most garish colors not just occasionally but throughout the movie's 105 minutes without a single break. The gangsters are cartoon cutoats, and Harvey Fierstein, so amazing in a stage debut decades ago that introduced Matthew Broderick to the world, is bloated and downright embarrassing to look at. Worst of all Robin Williams, endearing in "Good Morning Vietnam" and "Moscow on the Hudson" has now reached a low in his career, just when you thought there was only up to go after his smarmy role as the title character in "Patch Adams," excruciatingly sentimental in "What Dreams May Come" and unsubtle in "Jakob the Liar."

Robin Williams is featured as Rainbow Randolph, aka Smoochy, a fun guy in a rhino costume with a top-rated TV show who gets busted in a sting operation for accepting a bribe from a "parent" who wants her kid on the show. The sponsors look for someone to save the program and go with a talent to project its freedom from corruption and find their men in the third-rate entertainer, Sheldon Mopes, because Mopes is squeaky clean. A vegetarian and health faddist who believes that while children's shows should entertain they should also have salubrious messages for the tots, he is conned by an agent, Burke (Danny DeVito), who is in cohoots with gangsters. Nora (Catherine Keener), the show's producer, is not above shady dealings herself and tries to move Sheldon into the real world.

The movie is far from a complete loss. Though I hated to see Robin Williams as the incarnation of evil, an envious has-been determined to murder his replacement, some of the numbers are performed enthusiastically, so that we can understand what the children see in their hero and DeVito directs with a strong hand, keeping the action moving at a swift pace albeit without much time for a rest. Edward Norton and Catherine Keener have zero chemistry as a love match, and while Keener does not have the kind of script she deserves (read: anything by Neil LaBute), she comes across as the only principal in the show with her feet on the ground.

If "Death to Smoochy" were aimed more directly at the selling of shoddy, ephemeral, movie-related stuff by studio marketing departments, we'd have something to chew on. Maybe a sequel could go after the movie theaters themselves that push flagrantly overpriced popcorn and soda at the captive audience members who think that it's uncool to sit still without chomping away while the stories unfold. But this is not that picture.