The movie Robin Williams didn’t want to be remembered for: “That one is never mentioned”
Great actors are never remembered for their bad movies, and only in special cases does anyone, like Ed Wood, cement themselves in the history books for being rubbish at their job. Fortunately, the movie Robin Williams didn’t want to be remembered for is one that doesn’t come up that often.
What he will be remembered for is his enduring legacy as one of stand-up comedy’s most iconic acts, regardless of how many jokes he did or didn’t steal from other performers, with his boundlessly energetic, improvisational, and off-the-cuff style impossible to imitate, even if anyone wanted to.
He’ll also be remembered as one of his era’s biggest, most popular, and highest-paid movie stars, who was equally comfortable going off-script and mugging for the cameras as he was dialling it down and playing it straight in drama, which saw him claim an Academy Award from four nominations.
Beyond that, the sheer volume of co-stars, crew members, colleagues, filmmakers, producers, and many more who’ve spoken of his kindness and good-hearted nature, either behind the scenes or away from the camera, sees him endure as one of the industry’s all-around good eggs, so a shit film here or there won’t do anything to change that, and he made a few of them.
When he was promoting writer and director Omar Naim’s sci-fi thriller, The Final Cut, where he plays a man who works as a ‘cutter’, someone who edits the memories of people who’ve recently died and erases any of the bad ones in favour of a more uplifting and heartfelt collection to be played at their funerals, he was asked which of his movies he wouldn’t mind seeing wiped from his own mind.
The first thing that came to mind was Ivan Reitman’s 1997 comedy Fathers’ Day, with Williams and Crystal being ex-lovers of Toni Collette, who informs both of them that they’re the father of her runaway son, before they join forces to track down the absent teen and figure out which one of them is the boy’s dad.
The grotesquely unfunny and painfully tedious caper sank without a trace at the box office and was battered by critics, and he’d have been glad to permanently see the back of it. “Yeah, that’s why at the AFI tributes, that one is never mentioned, along with Club Paradise,” he said. “There are a couple that I go, ‘Where are those movies? I don’t know, hanging out with Bicentennial Man?'”
Williams’ disdain for Club Paradise was hardly a secret, with the actor confessing that he made the woeful comedy because he felt like he needed a commercial hit on his CV and he was paid an awful lot of money to make it, which backfired when it was a disaster on all fronts. Father’s Day, though, should have been much better than it was.
Reitman, Williams, Crystal, Collette, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Jared Harris, and an uncredited Mel Gibson cameo should have been able to come up with something better than an abominable, brainless flop, and if the leading man had his way, nobody would even remember it existed, not that many do anyway.
