robin williams has the rarest of gifts : the ability to rise above the most inept material and suffuse it with his irreverent style . overwhelmingly , his worst films are pleasantly diverting at worst and enjoyable at best ( with the notable exception of flubber ) . so when i , the one person who has refused to abandon him despite patch adams , tell you that not even williams can save his latest project , you know it's in trouble . jakob the liar is a confused , muddled little movie ; a generically " uplifting " film with a fundamental contradiction : the message it delivers is depressing as opposed to inspiring and the movie doesn't realize it . williams plays jakob haim , a jew imprisoned in a polish ghetto during world war ii . one night he wanders outside after curfew and is promptly sent to the office of a high-ranking german officer for his punishment . jakob gets off easy and he gets to hear approximately 30 seconds of a radio broadcast . the announcement ( in english , but punctuated by a triumphant " heil hitler ! " ) is that russian troops are only miles away from jakob's ghetto . liberation ! he thinks . the next day , jakob tells the news to his closest friend , a volatile prize fighter named misha ( liev schreiber ) , who despite being sworn to secrecy passes the message along . soon , it is a common assumption in the ghetto that jakob has a radio hidden in his home -- a crime punishable by death . this is absurdly false , but the more jakob tells the people of the ghetto this , the more convinced they become that he is abreast of the latest developments in the war that is to decide their fate . the danger , of course , is that the germans allegedly have informants throughout the ghetto , and rumors about the radio can get out and put jakob in great danger . in a curiously irrelevant subplot , jakob finds a 11-year old girl who has separated from her parents and decides to hide her in his small home . apparently he is afraid that she will be discovered , and goes to great length to make sure of that -- just why the idea frightens him is never made clear . he and the girl build an uninvolving , generic relationship that never goes anywhere and is as irrelevant at the end as it was in the beginning . the moral of the story is that hope is the best medicine . but jakob the liar forgets that the hope that jakob brings to his ghetto is false . such hope inevitably leads to expectations of its realization and when those expectations aren't met , the results are far worse than if there was no hope . that's the film's biggest detriment : it is based on a false assumption and thus comes off as painfully false . it's never moving because it doesn't give us anything to be moved by . jakob the liar fails to tug any heartstrings which destroys its purpose for existing . robin williams doesn't inject the film with life , as a matter of fact , he seems a little out of it , as if crippled by his fake accent . he is stragely unenthusiastic ; his character is one who spreads hope but his performance is lifeless , hopeless . not since good will hunting has he abandoned his signature style to this extent ; this isn't the robin williams we know and love . in good will hunting he became a serious actor and won an oscar for it . here , he is more of a wannabe serious actor ; an impostor . jakob the liar will be compared with last year's life is beautiful because it is being marketed as a " holocaust comedy " . it's not a comedy . it tries , sometimes , but it rarely works . is it a melodrama ? a war movie ? a character study ? no , no , and no . jakob the liar is the kind of movie that can't be placed into a category ; not because it covers so many different genres but because it fails at just about every one it attempts .
