Jacob The Liar

Will somebody please put this insufferable old bastard out of everybody else's misery? In the space of less than 18 months, Robin Williams has inflicted Flubber, Patch Adams and the malodorous What Dreams May Come upon audiences and critics alike, and I have slowly come to the conclusion that he must be hunted down and killed for the greater good of cinema's health.

Although he'd already passed the 'three strikes and you're out' limit, I decided to give him another chance, and so it came to pass that I sat through Jakob The Liar shaking my fists at the screen and turning purple through turquoise to blue with exasperation. Never again!

It's a blatant rip-off of Life Is Beautiful (a movie I will never watch because I don't like the title) which unapologetically treats the Holocaust as a ripe aul' subject for comedy. My position on the morals of this approach is simple: if it works, then fine. But Jakob The Liar is as amusing as toothache. Apparently unconcerned by the deadly seriousness of the subject matter, Williams milks it for all the comedy it's worth (in this instance, zilch) and then repeatedly over-compensates by wearing that wounded, aching expression in attempt to prove that he's doing it with all due reverence.

The plot runs thus: in the Nazi-occupied Jewish ghettoes of Poland in 1944, a thoroughly miserable populace await their imminent dispatch to the extermination camps, where most of their community have already headed.

Jakob (Williams) fictitiously claims to be in possession of a radio which is supposed to relate nightly news of the war's progress. He starts giving daily clandestine news bulletins to gatherings of his fellow Jews, telling them that the Soviet Army are almost in sight and that their liberation is a matter of weeks away. Jakob's tidings have a miraculous effect on morale within the otherwise-nightmarish environment in which they all live, and the suicide rate drops dramatically.

How on earth any of them take him seriously is another matter: Jakob, played with characteristic gloopiness by a wildly overacting Williams, is the least convincing liar in world cinema history. His 'bulletins' lurch hopelessly from one piece of badly-improvised bullshit to the next - and the entire crowd sit there and swallow it, even after they've asked him basic questions which cause his face to rack with fear and confusion for half an hour before he comes up with an answer.

It all backfires on the stupid fucker anyway: possession of a radio was a capital offence at the time, so our hero becomes the victim of a manhunt, executed with characteristic ruthlessness and efficiency by the Nazi authorities.

This results in two of the most wonderfully gratifying scenes I've ever witnessed on a widescreen: the torture scene and the execution. Without condoning the Nazis' behaviour, I've got to say they did exactly what I'd do if I got within bullet-range of the bastard. Death was the unanimous verdict of the four-man Blow Up jury which retired to a nearby den of iniquity cursing Robin Williams' name to eternal doom and damnation. This must be the last time.