Robin Williams stars as Hunter “Patch” Adams, a real-life doctor who believes that clowning around with patients helps them heal. The story of Adams’ career is indeed interesting and could have made one hell of a documentary. Instead, director Tom Shadyac and writer Steve Oedekerk – a team best known for the Ace Ventura movies – chose to give this worthwhile tale the standard Hollywood treatment.

Shadyac has said he wanted to do this film only if he could get Robin Williams to play Patch. Unfortunately, he did. Williams alternates between his compassionate/inspirational mode (i.e., Dead Poets Society, Awakenings) and his wild-and-crazy Mork persona, and in either case it’s familiar shtick. His idiosyncrasies are by now so ingrained and instantly recognizable that he’s incapable of playing anyone but himself.

It’s hard to imagine the real Patch Adams could be pleased with how he’s portrayed here. In the film, he’s a saint, devoting his life to “helping people” and battling the mean old medical establishment, which apparently exists to hurt people. It seems that until Patch came along with his revolutionary ideas, no physician in America had ever treated his patients as human beings. Oh, and by the way, Patch is a genius, too – he scores the highest grades in medical school without ever having to study, so he has plenty of leisure time to hang around hospital wards wearing an enema bulb on his nose and a bedpan on his head, curing patients with the force of his comedic brilliance. Stop, my sides are splitting!

Like many of the movies released during this holiday season, Patch Adams is calculatingly packaged to manipulate the audience, substituting sentimentality for genuine emotion and cranking up treacly music to generate drama where none exists. The platitude-laden script reaches its nadir at Williams’ big Oscar-moment speech, where he actually uses the phrase “as God is my witness.” This is far more hilarious than any of his zany antics.

The film might have been redeemed by a strong supporting cast, but all of the characters are one-dimensional, as if to prevent them from stealing any of the glory from Williams. As Patch’s love interest, Monica Potter looks remarkably like a young Julia Roberts, but she seems lifeless, as if her vivacity has been surgically removed.

The most insulting aspect of this movie, though, is its slapdash construction. It’s littered with anachronisms and egregious continuity bloopers. The story is set in the early 1970s, yet people are using things that simply weren’t around back then, like modern-style telephone answering machines and HMO insurance cards. Throughout his four years of medical school, Patch entertains the same group of young cancer patients, who seem frozen in time – they never age, get better, or die. There’s even a scene in which Williams is standing on a cliff and a dark object that can only be a boom microphone is momentarily visible above his head. Where were the editors?