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 . 
