Robert de Niro stars in The Comedian but critics aren't laughing

Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Cape Fear, Goodfellas, Raging Bull, The Godfather Part II, The Deer Hunter, Once Upon a Time in America: Robert De Niro has starred in some of the greatest films of all time. He was one of the greatest actors of all time.

What happened?

Last year, De Niro featured in one of the worst films of 2016, Dirty Grandpa. That’s not hyperbole: according to Meteoritic scores, Dirty Grandpa was the third worst film of the year with critics, while the film is up for four Golden Raspberry awards.

In recent years, he's also starred in The Intern, Grudge Match, Hide and Seek, Machete, and Little Fockers, to name a few.

Will 2017 be the year De Niro turns everything around? Apparently not. His latest project, The Comedian, in which De Niro plays an ageing stand-up comedian who was once famous, has flopped with critics.

“What’s more painful than watching a comedian bomb onstage in a live performance?” asks The Chicago Times in their one-star review. “Watching one of the greatest actors of all time bomb playing a comedian who is shockingly unfunny onstage, and an offensive boor offstage.”

The Wall Street Journal asks a slightly different question: “Why did Mr. De Niro do it, and why would anyone pay money to see it?” The Austin Chronicle adds: “They say dying is easy, comedy is hard. It's an observation that applies in more than one way to The Comedian.”

In one of the harshest reviews, The New York Post criticises the jokes (“heavy on the incest and child abuse references”) but focusses on De Niro.

“The bits aren’t bad, if you like the Friars Club school of comedy, but De Niro is,” the reviewer writes. “His clenched intensity ruins the bits, and the many real comics we see in cameos shame him. On at least three occasions, though, other characters tell him how hilarious he is. That’s a dire mistake on the part of the script, credited to four writers, two of them stand-ups. If you’re really funny, no announcement should be necessary.”

The Comedian reaches cinema screens in US on 3 February, while no UK release date has been announced.