Review of World's Greatest Dad (2009) by Digitalshark — 30 Nov 2010

This movie is admittedly not for all tastes, but really surprised me. The odd cover art you might see for this will typically just show Williams, and with all of the family friendly cookie cutter movies he's made, his image along with the title is bound to make people think it's another one of those Disney type popcorn movies, and that might be what they are expecting when they see it.

The intended audience (who might like darker and twisted comedies) might pass for the same reason, the title. It's meant to be darkly ironic of course, but I can just imagine what marketing discussions were like, they must have had no clue on how to "sell" this movie.

I truly enjoyed it, and it got big deserving laughs several times. Williams is at his absolute best, and the script is full of highly amusing dialogue. The one area where Bobcat flails a bit in my opinion is in relying too heavily and too often on montages set to music.

It's used very well in some scenes, and too much or too heavily in others. And when you have two humorous montage music segments within minutes of one another it really breaks up the flow of the story.

That said, that is really the extent of my criticism as I think the movie succeeds very well on it's own terms. Some of the smaller scenes are wonderfully played, such as a scene where Williams visits his paranoid shut in neighbor and they share a plate of pot brownies.

It's a shame more people will not see this movie, but then again it's the kind of comedy that makes people uncomfortable, like "King of Comedy." A lot of people won't enjoy being messed with in such a genuinely edgy way, but the right people will love it.

You don't see movies with guts like this one has very often.