Untrue Lies

Robin Williams has a Messiah complex. But he sports it so often that soon, I suspect, it will one day be known as the Robin Williams syndrome. Or perhaps the Patch Adams effect. Jakob the Liar is the story of a man (Robin Williams, of course), who dares to think differently, and then proceeds to save the world, or at least his part of it. Sort of like an Apple commercial.

Jakob is a Jew in a Polish ghetto during the latter stages of World War II. Radios are illegal in the ghetto, but Jakob manages to hear a snippet of a Nazi radio broadcast in which Russians troops are reported only 400 kilometers away. The next day, Jakob (who used to be a boxing manager... Uh, ok... ) finds Mischa (Liev Schreiber), the boxer he used to manage, on the verge of suicide. Jakob tells him that he's heard on the radio that the Russians are advancing, and this news convinces him to persevere. Of course, the boxer takes his new found desire for life a step too far: He informs everyone and his uncle (literally) that Jakob has a radio, that the Russians are about to end the war, and even takes the plunge and proposes marriage to a Jennifer Grey look-alike named Rosa. She's cute, by the way. Rosa, I mean. Well, Jennifer Grey was cute too.

Anyway, word spreads that Jakob has a radio and he denies it vehemently, but his denial only further convinces his neighbors that he has the radio. Patch-sorry-I mean Jakob, becomes something of a cult hero, and eventually finds himself running with it: He begins to deliver false radio reports of the rapidly approaching phantom Russian army, and instills hope in his fellow sufferers to the extent that there are no more suicides in the ghetto.

You get the picture. Jakob the Liar begins with Robin Williams telling a joke. We think immediately that the film will be similar to Good Morning Vietnam in that a horrible period of human history will be made at once more bearable and more poignant as only Robin Williams was once able to do. Instead, we get a long, drawn-out movie which is predictable from start to finish and not at all funny, and somehow even manages almost not to be poignant.