TOO LAZY TO BE FUNNY
Dirty Grandpa waste of acting talent
There’s a scene in Dirty Grandpa where Aubrey Plaza tells Zac Efron’s character: “You’re so good at singing, you actually suck.” Which is roughly how I feel about Robert De Niro’s acting in the film. At 72, the master thespian still has it. He just doesn’t always use it.
Truth be told, no one is doing their careers any favours by appearing in Dirty Grandpa, a heinously lazy comedy that can’t even find the energy to try to be funny, and so settles for offensive.
De Niro is merely the worst offender, and the one who should know better, especially in the scenes that call for full frontal.
He plays a recently widowed man who decides, now he’s single again, that he wants to “f--- f--f--f--- f--- !”
So he’s off to Florida with his grandson Jason (Efron), a corporate lawyer so straitlaced he has to stand up just to raise an eyebrow. Dermot Mulroney plays De Niro’s son and Efron’s dad and gets away relatively unscathed. I guess bad roles skip a generation.
Anyway, off they go to a realm where women frolic on beaches in slow motion, and where Ken Kesey’s bus seems to have gone to retire. Along the way they meet a trio of fellow travellers. Zoey Deutch is an ex-schoolmate of Jason’s, and they hit it off nicely. Plaza wants to sleep with gramps, and spends most of the movie trying to make that happen, leaving the audience to contemplate how icky things will get if she succeeds.
The third one? He’s Jeffrey Bowyer-Chapman, playing the gay friend. Because this is a movie, remember?
A few other characters of note. Julianne Hough pays Meredith, Jason’s fiancée, and bears a striking resemblance to Meg Ryan, only younger and with a less diligent agent. Jason Mantzoukas is a motor-mouthed drug dealer. And Danny Glover, God bless ’im, shows up in cameo as De Niro’s old army buddy and delivers the film’s only laugh-worthy line, an unprintable riposte to an old episode of ALF.
Dirty Grandpa was directed by Dan Mazer (I Give It a Year), and written by John Phillips. This is truly an achievement for a first-time writer; usually it takes a committee of at least four or five scribes, with a history of lame comedies under their belts, to reach the levels of bad humour and depravity seen here. In the spirit of the movie, I take my hat off to him. And my pants.