World's Greatest Dad (2009) - Film Review

I don't even know World's Greatest Dad coming out in 2009. I read reviews about this one saying that although it wasn’t great, it was worth a watch. Well, a saturday night comes around and I decide to give it a go. I pretty much enjoyed it. Yes, it was a little slow to get going, but once it did I found it pretty entertaining. I think it helps that I quite like Robin Williams. I will give you my thoughts on this rather good dark comedy after this brief summary.

Lance is a High school English teacher who has ambitions to become a writer. The only trouble is, he hasn’t had anything published yet. He is a single parent, living with his fifteen year old son, Kyle. Now Kyle is not very bright and a bit of a jerk most of the time, he does, however, have one friend, Andrew.

Lance is having a secret affair with a fellow teacher, Claire, but she seems to be attracted to another teacher, Mike Lane. It all changes when Kyle meets with an unfortunate, and fatal, accident. In trying to cover it up, Lance writes him a suicide note and stages his death. He eventually returns to work and finds that everyone is cordial enough, but when the suicide note is published in the school paper things really start to get interesting for Lance.

A nicely made film with the action interspersed with some pretty good tunes. The story did take a little while before it went anywhere, there seemed to be a lot of exposition for about forty minutes. I was just about getting frustrated that nothing seemed to be happening when things picked up. The latter two thirds of the film are quite witty and (I found) more enjoyable to watch. It’s not a complicated plot, I found it easy to predict the ending, but it did it’d job and I can’t knock it for that!

Ultimately, I found it a rather good and deeply dark comedy. Recommended!