Patch Adams (1999, DVD)

Here is the final proof that Hollywood will sink to any depths. This is a joyless, lifeless, pathetic and ugly movie. The assumption here is that if they pretend to care about sick people, then it's OK to point at and pity cancer patients and the emotionally disturbed.

It's a staggeringly predictable and moronic story with really nothing to recommend it, unless you're a fan of amateurish, sloppy and manipulative filmmaking. Robin Williams should truly be ashamed.

Patch Adams is so unquestionably bad in every respect; it makes me want to weep. It also made over like $120 million, which poses an interesting question: Why do so many brain-dead and awful movies explode like this? Easy answer: A whole lot of people are MORONS!

People seem to like to have their emotions tweaked in an artificial fashion. They enjoy it when the same lame jokes are repeated by the same (formerly brilliant, now sad) actor in the same sappy movie. Come on, if there's ONE authentic scene in this pile of junk, please enlighten me as to what lump of artifice it was hiding under.

OK, so what makes Patch Adams so much worse than any other "unbelievably lame Hollywood movie in which there is no real effort displayed by anyone" movie? Where to start? Try the beginning when we meet Hunter Adams, who commits himself to a loony bin. STOP! OK, are ever we told WHY he's so blue? Are we told ANYTHING about him? No, but he sure likes staring off in the distance and looking bemused. (Get used to it. He does it the whole movie.)

Hunter realizes that he can help cure manic and mental patients simply by playing along with their delusions. (Silly mental patients.) Of course we get to meet a "loony" bunch of inmates that is so stereotyped and sad, I can't believe it was made in this day and age. I'm sorry, I can't even believe I'm trying to even explain the amount of cliches and formula we're treated to here.

OK, get this--The first doctor we meet.... is cold, clinical and mean. It s just awful, since this one cardboard character is meant to represent every doctor Hunter will ever meet. Hunter also meets some Yoda-type guy in the asylum who explains that if he can just stare at his hand until everything gets blurry, he'll be sane. (I swear.)

So Hunter starts calling himself Patch and joins medical school because he loves people. The terribly evil dean hates his methods and Patch meets a nerdy gang of students to hang with. (Hey, I just saved you like a half-hour right there.) Problems arise when the dean says "Hey, Patch, I don't like you coming in to my hospital and making my cancer patients giggle. You have to wait until your THIRD year until you can come in here and take that damn thing off your nose. You're a grown man!"

There is not ONE scene in this movie that doesn't possess the following things:

1. Robin Williams with a crooked smile and big wide eyes and a bunch of talent being so wasted you want to hit him in the face with a rock.

2. Horrible and schmaltz-heavy piano music. God forbid people try to find their own emotion in a movie. Much better for us to have these 'emotional cues' so we know when we should be sobbing.

3. Just the most trite, formulaic, predictable, inane and familiar dialogue I've heard in a while: Stuff like "People have names and not numbers", "Are you ever serious?", "I've loved you since I first time I met you" and (if honesty prevailed) "I like to prostitute the idea of cancerous children just to further my movie career."

This movie is just so desperate to connect on any level, it's like a barrage of constant grief: Boom--Cancer kids! --That one didn't get you? Booms--Mental retardation! --Still not weepy? Boom!--- Forced and pathetic deathbed scenes? ---OK, Still holding out?

Well, I'll be here all day because I got all kinds of junk in the Patch Adams bag: The 'Shocking Death of an Attractive Person' Scene; the 'Standing Up in the Face of Authority' scene; The 'Huge Pathetic Grandstand in a Courtroom Scene'; and the 'Everyone Clapping while the one ignorant moron looks on wistfully' scene.

It's all familiar and it's ALL here, and there's some unique spins on OLD pathetic scenes also: The Wow, look at all the balloons in here party scene; the 'crying pathetically and pounding on a coffin' scene; and my favorite: The 'lets all put on our red noses to show support for this misunderstood imbecile med student' scene. Originality is not the strong suit of this film, I guess is what I'm saying.

Individual scenes of depravity that Robin Williams jumps right into with a big sh*t-eating grin are all that keeps Patch Adams moving. You have to wonder how much more pathetic it can get.

I'm still having horrible flashbacks: Robin in a pool full of NOODLES with some dying old lady? WHAT? Robin flailing his arms and buzzing like a bee while cancer-ridden children giggle and lose their teeth, and then he puts a BEDPAN on his HEAD and wears them as SHOES also? WHAT? Robin startling a near dead man awake and throwing fifty balloon ANIMALS in his FACE? WHAT? (P.S. This last one makes absolutely no sense in the movie at all, since the scenes where we would learn about this patient were obviously edited out. Just another sign of respect from your filmmakers.)

Never before have I seen a movie sink to such horrible methods to evoke some emotion. Their thinking must have been "Hey, how can anyone trash a movie where we make little tiny cancer kids giggle? THINK, people!"

Actually, there are a few scenes (OK, one) when another character (Patch's chubby roommate) tells him exactly why he is so annoying and pathetic. I was cheering the roommate's every line, and I knew the damn screenwriter would close the scene with Robin muttering some arcane line, thereby getting the last word, then leave the room. I was exactly right about how this scene ended, I became depressed, and I wept.

It's pandering, simpering, ugly, mawkish, uncomfortable, unfunny and a vile affront to any intelligent moviegoer. Forced, fake, false and transparent, it tries to address problems by sugarcoating them in the worst possible Hollywood fashion. An obvious hack job, yet it still struck a huge chord with the masses, and for this I weep, yet again.

A true embarrassment and Robin Williams needs to learn to stop with these condescending and falsely-life affirming movies. He has now become the textbook example of what a sellout is. Want proof of how false and sad this movie actually is? Try showing it to some kids who have actually suffered through cancer treatment and see if they think Patch Adams' medical techniques are "wacky" or "funny". Just the worst.