Heard a lot about this movie earlier this year and I finally found it in a pirated shop. Uhh... I'm not sure how to go about explaining this movie to you guys.. OK let's give it a try.
So the movie is about Lance Clayton, a failed writer and teacher in his late 40's who's son, Kyle is the biggest unappreciative asshole son of a bitch there ever was. Lance's girlfriend dates him on her own convenience and.. pretty much his life sucks. But when his son accidentally dies while masturbating, Lance makes it look like a suicide to protect him and his family from shame and fabricates a suicide note. Little did he know, the suicide note would strike a chord with everyone in his school. Soon, a cult in Kyle's honor emerges with people claiming they liked Kyle and Lance all along. With the success of the suicide note, Lance begins writing a journal in his son's name to continue the beneficial facade.
World's Greatest Dad explores how fake people can be. Especially when there's some new trend and people jump on the bandwagon just so they are in the majority. I was actually kinda disturbed watching how far these teens would go to feel included. And we're all victims of this. How many times has a celebrity died and suddenly, a million people started saying how much hey loved him/her, i.e all those fake Micheal Jackson lovers.
Robin Williams gives an awesome performance of the father who is tortured with the loss of a son who never cared about him and his guilt of reaping benefits he always wanted from is son's death. I really wanted to say he was funny in the movie (cause he was) but his character is really really messed up to the point where it's uncomfortable to even watch him. I just kept thinking, "How can this guy sleep at night, seriously".
And Daryl Sabara who plays is son.. as much as I wanted to give the guy a big slap, I gotta say the dude's come a long way from Spy Kids. His character has gotta be the douche-iest character I've seen all year and I was incredibly entertained watching him bask in all his ass-holiness.
The subject matter was really interesting and I wished they played around with it some more instead of going about the usual Robin William jokes. The story did drag a bit too long and added a lot of unnecessary cheap laughs to what was suppose to be a very deep controversial social statement.
Overall, great acting by Robin Williams, interesting concept, poor execution.
RATING: 6/10