Ben Mankiewicz liked it, which should be your first clue that World's Greatest Dad isn't exactly cinematic gold. In fact, it's inordinately creepy from many angles.Bobcat Goldthwait (yes, him) wrote and directed this little number about aspiring writer Lance Clayton (Robin Williams), who's both a high school teacher and a father. His son Kyle (Daryl "Spy Kids" Sabara) is a moody little snot with a chip on his shoulder and a predilection for auto-erotic aspyhxiation. When Kyle accidentally kills himself, Lance sanitizes the scene and stages it as a suicide, forging a suicide note. The note gets made public, though, and Lance creates more writing under Kyle's name. Ironically, his life -and his relationship with art teacher Claire (Alexie Gilmore) turns around.
I like Robin Williams, I really do; his stand-up is always outrageous and sends me into great big rolling fits of laughter. And for some reason that just never translates into his movie career. I thought Mrs. Doubtfire was loathsome, I couldn't bring myself to finish that robot movie he was in (indeed, I can't even remember the name of it), and the only movies of his I can rewatch are Aladdin and Insomnia (though that's more due to the Al Pacino/Christopher Nolan factors). World's Greatest Dad represents another entry in the "Robin Williams Canon of Unlikeable Protagonists." Lance Clayton is completely irredeemable (though the film tries desperately to do it, with baptismal imagery and a new family formed at the end), and Williams's performance is fairly flat. Where Matt Damon was putzy and at least amicable in The Informant!, World's Greatest Dad has none of the personality or moral compass that other "good people gone bad" movies have; consequently, Williams's performance comes off as very one-note.
Sabara, however, deserves a little more credit. On a visceral reaction, Kyle is a very unappealing and even repulsive character. He's foul-mouthed, governed by his hormones, and entirely unpleasant to be around. My instant reaction to the character was that I disliked him. He irritated me. That's when I realized how good of a performer Sabara is. To step inside a character that repugnant and to make him real in a way that the audience feels exactly the way about him that even his father feels - that's good acting. It's both a pity and a relief that he bows out of the picture so early.
The DVD cover lauds the film as hysterical and exuberantly funny, and I genuinely wanted that to be the case. I haven't seen a decent funny movie in a long time, and I'm beginning to wonder if real comedies still exist. (I'm still holding out hope, considering the city on the hill known as The Hangover.) World's Greatest Dad just isn't funny. It's tragic, it's pathetic, it's darkly ironic, and it's uncomfortably exploitative - but funny? Nope. There are more yuks in the internal monologue of an insomniac than in this movie. A few grins elicited here, a chuckle or two drawn out there - this is the sum total of the entertainment value of World's Greatest Dad. The film is more interested in the character of Lance Clayton, but it's an ambiguous characterization. On one count, his actions are entirely offensive, but "wrong" is a verdict the film is unwilling to render. Perhaps that's a matter of the writer being too attached to a character to label him immoral, or perhaps the movie wants the viewer to decide. Either way, World's Greatest Dad amounts to a tacit approval of behavior not far from despicable. Its worst crime, though, is pretending to be a comedy.
World's Greatest Dad isn't all that great. It's off-putting and uncomfortable in a way that might have been the creator's intention, but as it stands it's a primarily disturbing film punctuated with moments of pitch-black comedy.
World's Greatest Dad is rated R "for language, crude and sexual content, some drug use and disturbing images." This film has some of the crassest sexual dialogue I've seen in a movie, and I say that having seen Superbad several times. If there's a sex act out there, this movie talks about it in pretty graphic detail. Marijuana is abused a few times, too. And if you ever wanted to see Robin Williams completely naked, this is the movie for you.
(By the way, the aforementioned robot movie was Bicentennial Man. It would have bugged me if I didn't look it up.)
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