When the truth entails ruin . . .

World's Greatest Dad

Crit

Lance Clayton (Robin Williams) is a failure as a novelist and as a high school English teacher, and his 15-year-old son Kyle (Daryl Sabara) is a dick, liked only by one friend and loved only by his father. When Kyle dies accidentally via autoerotic asphyxiation, Lance opts for damage control, rearranging the evidence to make it look like suicide and writing a suicide note. As a result of that lie, and the others to which it naturally leads, father and son become the darlings of the school en route to national acclaim.

There's nothing subtle here, but hey, do we expect subtlety from director Bobcat Goldthwait? What we get is just the right number and right sort of laughs--did I mention it's a comedy?--and the sort of warped performance, inspiring both sympathy and contempt, that has made us forgive Williams for the general direction of his career in the past . . . what? decade? two decades? There were two of us in the theater, so it's safe to say this is not going to play in Peoria, but it's worth a spot in your Netflix futures queue.