World's Greatest Dad, not so great

World's Greatest Dad (2009)
Jamal's Rating: 2 stars
Netflix Average Rating: 2.9 stars

Decent Netflix rating, and glowing reviews from the crits, I had no idea what a clunker I was in for. I guess a good tip would have been to look at the box cover, which featured a bland Robin Williams against a light blue backdrop of millions of little critic blurbs, like "Hilarious", "Wonderful", "Smart", and "Twisted". He is holding a coffee cup with the word's "World's Greatest Dad" and the title of the same is sprawled out in blocky red letters directly above that. Not a good sign. And not a good movie either.  The only laughs I can recall in this black comedy is when a TV person is instructing Williams to look up, while his makeup artist is instructing him to look down. Robin Williams gently grimaces his way through the script, recalling the better days of movies like Good Will Hunting. Daryl Sabara plays the rotten perverted son really well, but the scenes where he disses his dad or describes lewd sexual acts are just cringe-worthy, never funny. The movie ends with a dramatic speech that wasn't built up for at all -- it just came from out of nowhere. And all the characters end up where we expected them to all along. A smart film really could be made from this idea of how people respond to death by giving it all sorts of vaporous meaning, but this ain't it. The movie was written and directed by Bobcat Goldthwait and frankly, I expected better from the guy who stammered and drooled through all those Muppets shows as Animal.