Absolutely Anything is an amusing comedy where a group of four eccentric aliens give an average human the ability to do anything he wants, simply by waving his hand. That human is a teacher named Neil Clarke (Simon Pegg).

After discovering this amazing ability and realising its potential, Neil changes a lot of things for himself to make his life easier without the stresses and difficulties that one would usually face day-to-day. To start with he made his work life a lot more positive, making his students polite and eager to learn, plus having his headmaster boss (Eddie Izzard) like him. He also worked on his love life, attempting to make the attractive and likable neighbour downstairs fall in love with him.

The four animated aliens, voiced by the cast of Monty Python, put these powers upon Neil as they captured a probe sent to space, so decided to assess the planet by seeing if the person they give these powers, use them for good. I saw this movie soon after watching Pixels, a movie with a very similar start, with a probe going out to space and attracting the attention of aliens. Not sure if this is a coincidence of if the writers of these two films spoke to each other.

Absolutely Anything sports an experienced cast, with Kate Beckinsale, Simon Pegg and Rob Riggle starring in the movie along with the voice of the late, great Robin Williams, all of which played likable characters. I did however dislike the character Emma Pierson played, Miss Pringle. I felt that her character didn’t really add anything to the story and was there purely to try and grab a few more laughs, of which it failed. In the screening I was at, only one person laughed at this character. He was clearly the type of guy that would go to an amateur comedy night and find every joke hilarious.

While seeing Neil learn his powers and start to make the world a better place, we regularly jumped to have some unnecessary and unfunny input from the group of aliens, not really adding to the story and distracting the flow that was only just starting to build since the last time we saw them.

This movie had the potential to be really quite good, but with the amount of unnecessary characters and random jumping around into tangents it took away some of the humour to this film, making Absolutely Anything just simply amusing. It was not a funny comedy; I don’t remember seeing a moment that particularly stood out to me as funny. Then again, it wasn’t a particularly bad film, it felt very average.

Watching this film was an extremely sad moment also as this will be the last film released with acting credits to Robin Williams. Robin voiced a lively dog named Dennis with a biscuit obsession and a constant wish to hump Neil’s leg. Clearly not the pinnacle of his career, but I felt the positive and energetic character was a well suited for what ended up being his last.

Absolutely Anything was unfortunately just an average film with potential to be a lot better than it was.