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Reviews of Recent Independent, Foreign, & Documentary Films in Theaters and DVD/Home Video
WORLD’S GREATEST DAD Kyle (Daryl Sabara) makes his first appearance in World’s Greatest Dad with his neck strapped to a computer chair, irate that his father, Lance (Robin Williams), has interrupted his nightly autoerotic asphyxiation. As characters go, Kyle is pretty disgusting. He is a teenager with a passion for German snuff porn, and he calls everyone a faggot, particularly his one and only friend, Andrew (Evan Martin), who he also mocks for having no father and an alcoholic mother. Go ahead and try not to enjoy Kyle’s mid-film death. But Lance is too embarrassed to let the public know that his son died through self-strangling for a better orgasm while masturbating to a smattering of cell phone photos he took of his father’s girlfriend’s panties at a family dinner. So Lance makes a noose, rearranges the death scene, and types a suicide note. (Lance is not just a failed writer, but also an unpopular teacher at his son’s high school.) When his students track down Kyle’s inexplicably well-written suicide note online, mourning overwhelms a student body hungry for a deeper meaning in their own lives. Kyle becomes so popular in death that the library is renamed in the scumbag’s honor, and Lance both revels in and reviles the attention from his despicable son’s joke of a death. Kyle turns out to be one of the most honest characters of the film. He said what he felt, did what he wanted, and refused to apologize or feel remorse. But irony doesn’t just turn a black comedy into a telling emotional parable. Writer-director Bobcat Goldthwait (yes, that Bobcat Goldthwait—who also wrote and directed 2006’s Sleeping Dogs Lie) made a film so dry it’s dehydrating. Plot points feel inevitable—do you think Lance gets
away with it?—and characters feel like hastily-rendered cartoons used to
underscore Lance’s hypocrisy. No character in the film is likable by the
end. Kyle is a lost cause, Lance undermines any possible audience
affection with his blunt stupidity (after the suicide note’s popular
success, Lance writes an entire fake journal in Kyle’s name), and
Goldthwait’s other characters appear only as obliging sycophants ready
to mine Kyle’s death for their own betterment. At least Robin Williams
throws himself full-throttle into full-frontal nudity during the final
scene. America’s been waiting for that since, well, The Fisher King.
Zachary Jones
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