World's Greatest Dad

I have only ever left a movie once for its complete and utter stupidity and that was when I was a teenager in Holland on a night out at the movies seeing the American hack-up version of Godzilla; and in my defense I was only even watching it because the girl I was with wanted to go and I was so puppy-in-love with her I probably would have gone break dancing on broken glass if she had asked me.

The mentioning of a movie that came out eleven years ago may not seem terribly relevant save for the fact that it illustrates my enormous tolerance for poor movie choices. If you consider all of the God awful drudgery that has been created between Godzilla and today, it says something about me that I have never once walked out on any other film, although I admit that this happens more often than not because I am a cheap person and I want to get my money’s worth out of every ticket I buy – that coupled with the fact that you are no longer allowed to refill your popcorn once you have left the cinema.

Which brings me to World’s Greatest Dad, the first movie in eleven years to test my all of my limits.

In all fairness to the film before I tear into minute shreds for hamster cages, World’s Greatest Dad suffers twice over from poor marketing decisions before the film begins its first twenty-fourth of a second. First and foremost, the trailer is nothing short of an outright lie. I appreciate that the marketers did their best, very successfully I might add, to hide the enormous plot twist about half way through the movie and so they use a great deal of character development scenes in the trailer to make this film look as if it is going to be driven by the main character Lance Clayton, played by Robin Williams, here so bizarrely named the World’s Greatest Dad, and his relationship with his son. Almost all of the scenes in the trailer point to this relationship being key for pushing the story forward, which is complete and utter nonsense because the film in fact has almost nothing to do with Clayton being the World’s Greatest Dad.

Which brings me to my second problem with this movie. Who approved this title and under what twisted justification? The movie doesn’t really touch on Lance Clayton as a father. True enough that the driving storyline is his life and career and there is a rather humorous connection with his son through this, but the film ultimately has absolutely nothing to do with him, his relationship with his son, or any other aspect of fatherhood.

And it is this point that royally drives me mad when I see it, let alone live through it. It is one of those little aspects of art which are so minute, you only recognize them when they fail; otherwise you don’t even think of their being there. But think, for a moment, if I The Reader had inappropriately been named The Bathtub. Seeing the film, I would wager that a great deal of people would be confused, what with there being a bathtub in a scene or two, but no primary storyline coming out of that aspect of the film. That is to say, the bathtub is a piece of furniture, not a plot device, much in the same way that Robin William’s fatherhood is present, but not ultimately relevant in the story.

Some who have already seen the film might argue that I am missing the point, but I would be forced to point out that you could replace the son in this film with almost any other kind of human being: daughter, father, wife, gardener and have the same result. The father-son relationship here is completely useless.

I wanted to see a film about a dad, who apparently is the world’s greatest. I watch the trailer again and I get confused and frustrated. I want to see that movie.

All of this, of course, without even beginning to talk about the film itself. If I haven’t already given enough reason to avoid this silver screen tripe, here are a few others: the movie contains every stereotype known to man from the rude Hollywood version of the teenage Goth chick, a myth amongst those who never met a real one, to the stereotypical African-American who only got published in the New Yorker because he wrote a satire on racial injustice. Couple these stereotypes with all of the paper-thin characters and you get nothing likable about the entire cast.

And that is something else that annoys me in movies like this one – how ridiculously in-your-face the juxtaposition of characters is presented. There is nothing creative or even funny about one character having flaws and then putting him up against the ‘perfect man’ as defined by a number of preset stereotypes again, and watching a love interest wax and wane between the sincerity of the one and the perfection of the other. Stranger even still in World’s Greatest Dad is that they do this for only about half the film and then role reverse the hero and the villain.

The choices people make are illogical, the dialogue is complete nonsense, the characters are unlikable, the jokes aren’t funny and the plot is predictable.

I will accord them this much, the plot twist about half way through the film was completely unforeseen and for about an entire minute I was blown away by this movie. For what it is worth, I was also the only one in the cinema who didn’t seem to be having a good time. I was surrounded by a quarter full theater who seemed to love the film, laughing and smiling and having a grand old time.

So perhaps I am being too hard on World’s Greatest Dad. Perhaps upon reflection with the memory of the crowd around me enjoying themselves I should reconsider my position but, pompous as I am, I am more quickly reminded of the episode of the Simpsons when Homer has crayon removed from his brain.