It doesn't get any worse than this dog....

Rating: Null/10 (8 December 2000)

***SPOILERS*** ***SPOILERS*** I can't quite articulate how much I despise this sorry excuse for a piece of entertainment. It might come as a shock to a lot of cinema-goers who found it 'heartwarming' or 'inspiring', but I regard this as unequivocally the crappiest film ever made. I mean it actually makes me want to throw up.
All Robin Williams movies are identical in terms of narrative structure. He's a 'zany', funny guy who arrives in some stuffy institutionalised environment, and sets about bucking the system, making a difference, changing traditional perspectives. Oh God, no, please. This is beyond sad.

In this movie he plays an English teacher whose unconventional teaching style inspires his pupils to get into literature and poetry. These contemptable losers then go and set up a secret society where they read poetry and smoke pipes in the woods. Now, if they'd pulled something like this at the school I went to, they'd all soon find that their lives were no longer worth living.
Obviously the old codgers who run the posh private school don't take to kindly to Williams' crazy antics, such as persuading his whole class to stand on their desks and behave like complete cretins. Then they sort of march around and chant poetry. Can this dire nonsense get any worse ?

Absolutely. It continues to insult my inteligence right to the bitter, stinking end. There's some bloke who's supposed to be going to medical school, who due to the influence of Williams, decides he'd rather take up acting instead. His father is fairly p****d off at this development - and who can blame him ? Anyway, to cut a long and extremely cheesy story short, the guy kills himself with his father's pistol because he can't be an actor. I have to admit that I laughed out loud at this point, simply because the character pretty much deserved to die for being so utterly lame.

Peter Weir, the director, has made some pretty good films including Gallipoli and The Truman Show (which everyone should find the time to watch), but this was without a doubt his darkest hour.

As for Williams, please leave us alone now. You were once funny as a coked-up motormouth comedian in the seventies and early eighties, but the kind of faux-sincerity exemplified by this aberration is irritating to the point where his grinning face mkes my blood boil with rage.

Good Morning Vietnam and Patch Adams are probably just as bad or perhaps even worse - I wouldn't know as I was unable to sit through either of them.

The opinions expressed here probably won't be enormously popular, as judging by some of the gushing reviews on IMDb this movie has a special place in lots of people's hearts. To those people I prescribe an episode of Mork & Mindy each day until they make a full recovery from their deep-rooted Robin Williams affliction....