World's Greatest Dad - Bobcat Goldthwait

Seen for the first time in February 2013.

"World's Greatest Dad," is one of those movies that were it just a little bit different, it would be one of my all time favorite comedies, but that also it's flaws are so significant, that it's not even a near-great comedy, just a pretty good one.

It starts off incredibly strong. Almost all of the laughs in this movie come from the character of Kyle, the son of the main character played by Robin Williams who is a lonely struggling novelist and who otherwise leads a bummed out existence as a high school poetry teacher. Kyle has charisma and hilarious antisocial tendencies which carry the movie. His every utterance and action stand in opposition to certain conformist ideals about how normal people think and behave. He's an obnoxious teenager who loves little more than extreme porn, but his misanthropy has a startling wit that entertains in its shockingness.

Unfortunately the movie kills him off relatively early on, and the film dies with him. Suddenly there's nothing funny left in the movie, just Robin Williams's character sadly exploiting his son's death in moments of human weakness, and tired satire borrowed from "Heathers." Though the indictment of Robin Williams's girlfriend's shallowness and phoniness is brilliant and cutting. On the other hand, when the "gay jock" confides in Robin Williams's character his private emotions, I'm not sure if we are supposed to be laughing at that, and if we are, why? There's a weakness in the film's inability to treat people like genuine people who actually have real feelings (even if they are instigated by fraudulence), rather than completely contemptible and mock-able phonies. This is especially egregious to me when done to high school kids, butterflies in their youth, who will either grow up into good decent people or who maybe won't. But save the vitriol for adults, in my opinion. Satirizing high school kids is like yelling at a kitten. It's fucking stupid. The kids are all right you know?

And then we get to the ending, and it seems they chose to deliver the only ending they could have imagined for this thing. But I wish they were ballsier and went with something more cynical. That would have made for a far better movie in my opinion. Something unexpected. But what this movie is trying to say and be isn't what I want it to say and be at this point, and I can respect that. I can't hate something for not being something that it's not trying to be. I just wish it were. But I get the sense of liberation. That scene is sold well. I just wish this movie was more into delivering cynical laughs than it was in making cheap tired points about phoniness, shallowness, and idiot-spectacle. Grade B.