Dirty Grandpa

The whole time I was watching Dirty Grandpa, I found myself thinking back to Bad Grandpa.  That was that comedy from a couple years ago that featured Johnny Knoxville hidden under old man make up, doing a lot of crude hidden camera pranks on unsuspecting every day people.  That wasn't exactly a great movie, but it had some laughs at least.  That's more than I can say for this movie, where I did not laugh once.  You know you're watching a bad movie when Robert De Niro is up there on the screen, and you find yourself wishing you were watching the guy from Jackass.

And oh yes, Dirty Grandpa is a very bad movie.  Lousy, even.  It's built solely around the idea that De Niro playing a horny old man whose dialogue is made up of endless innuendos, and dreams of having sex with college women is all a comedy needs to be successful.  It exists only to shock and offend.  Okay, fair enough.  But in order for us to be shocked and offended, we also have to be invested in what's going on.  If all you've got is one of our great actors insulting everybody's manhood and screaming about tits and ass, you obviously aren't trying hard enough.  That's exactly this movie's problem.  It doesn't want to try.  Oh, it's certainly gross and inappropriate, but that alone doesn't make a successful shocking comedy.  The better movies of filmmakers like Mel Brooks and the Farrelly Brothers understood this.  Your jokes are not simply the shock value, rather your jokes should build from the shock itself.

Here, we get a tepid road trip comedy with De Niro as the horny old coot, Dick Kelly, and Zac Efron as his suffering and constantly embarrassed grandson, Jason.  They're on a trek across Florida during Spring Break, so that De Niro's character can have sex with a woman much younger than him.  His wife has just died, and he hasn't had sex in 20 years, so he's more than ready.  As for Efron?  His character is a young, up-tight lawyer who is about to get married to a Bridezilla, and has never actually lived life.  So, naturally, this trip is also designed so that the grandson can cut loose and have fun for the first time in his life, and realize that people have been controlling him and telling him what to do his entire life.  Yes, just like all recent raunchy comedies, this one has to have a message tacked on, and turn all gooey and sentimental near the end.  Dick Kelly may be insensitive, a racist, a jerk, and an oversexed old dog, but he really does care about his grandson, and he also wants to improve his relationship with his son (Jason's dad), because he was never there for him growing up.  Barf.

We're supposed to be happy to see the two characters bond during the trip, and we're also supposed to be happy that Efron's character sees how life really is.  Also, he realizes that he doesn't actually love his fiance, rather he loves an old friend from his college days (Zoey Deutch) that he bumps into early on in the film.  But the two actors never create a believable chemistry with each other.  They start out estranged and distant, as they haven't seen each other in years.  And when the movie reaches its happy end, they still seem like they don't actually like being near each other.  De Niro I can completely understand.  He's obviously in paycheck mode with this one, and didn't have to bring his best to the set.  And Efron?  His popularity with audiences continues to elude me.  Sure, he is good looking, but he has no screen presence or comic timing.  This isn't just something I noticed here, it's the same with every performance I've seen him in.  Any relatively handsome guy under 30 could do most of the things that he does.

But the acting isn't even the real problem here, it's the script itself.  It's the kind that thinks that talking dirty and four-letter words being repeated endlessly is funny.    It builds contrived embarrassing situations that don't seem real in the first place, so we don't laugh.  There's a particularly horrible scene where Jason finds himself naked on a beach, with only a stuffed bee toy covering his privates.  His fiance calls, and wants to talk on video chat.  She brings her parents, and even their Rabi in on the call, as Jason frantically tries to pretend he's not naked on a beach, that he's at home.  It gets even worse when some random little boy runs up to him, and wants to play with the toy that's covering his privates.  This isn't an embarrassing situation, it's simply stupidity building on itself to the point that we give up on the scene and wait for it to end.

But that's just the kind of movie that Dirty Grandpa is.  It tries so hard to push edges and boundaries, and only ends up falling flat with each attempt.  It doesn't understand that merely pushing isn't enough.  We have to be invested in what's happening, and who this stuff is happening to.  Adding a layer of sentimentality to the film's final half hour isn't going to do that.  We have to like these people from the start when they're being crude.  I never liked these characters, and liked them even less when the movie was trying to force me to like them.

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