Stunts are still mean, rude and crude
Stop me if you’ve heard this one. In fact, stop me if you haven’t: A dirty old man goes into a strip club only to discover that it’s a woman’s club and the strippers are hunky men, some of them with their hunkiness showing, if you catch my drift.
The old man — who is perpetually horny, a joke that’s about as old as he is — decides to join the fun. He takes off his pants and does a coarse, old-man kind of stripper’s dance, during which his testicles fall out of his underwear.
The testicles droop to his knees. The women in the strip club are alternately appalled and tickled.
And guess what. It’s all just made up, a staged prank for the movie Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa.
The old man, one Irving Zisman, is actually Johnny Knoxville, the head Jackass, now expanding the group’s repertoire of dangerous stunts — dangling over an alligator pit with chicken in your underwear, or sticking a toy car into your rectum — into a kind of Borat tour of Middle America.
Wearing persuasive makeup, Irving is taking his eight-year-old grandson Billy (an appealing child actor named Jackson Nicoll) to live with his reprobate father.
Along the way they will grow closer, outrage several innocent bystanders, and, in one particularly telling stunt, pretend to poop on the wall of a restaurant, thus flabbergasting their fellow diners.
Bad Grandpa comes late to the game of hidden-camera humour, of which Sacha Baron Cohen is the modern pioneer, but it is unique in its combination of outrage and sentiment, which turns out to be a particularly repellent combination.
Knoxville and his fellow writers Spike Jonze and Jeff Tremaine (who also directed) want to provide tears of emotion between the tears of laughter.
But while there is real chemistry between Irving and Billy — or rather, Knoxville and Nicoll — those are the scripted parts of the film, and, having witnessed the poor suckers who take the stunt part seriously, we’re leery of how genuine it might be.
The hidden-camera stuff is where Bad Grandpa makes its mark, and if the idea of prosthetic testicles strikes you as comic gold, you’re in for a rare treat.
The pranks are designed to be as outrageous as possible, and involve things like indignities to a dead body (Irving’s wife has passed away and he is transporting her in the trunk of his car).
The fun is supposed to come in watching people’s reactions, but punking innocent bystanders is both too easy and mean-spirited: The targets are often well-meaning passersby who want to save Billy from his disorderly grandfather.
I found it tiresome, although at a recent première, I was surrounded by moviegoers in danger of choking to death on their mirth.
There is, in all of this, one moment of inspiration: a junior miss beauty pageant peopled by sexualized little girls — real ones, apparently, and hypnotically fascinating in their crude artificiality — that is disrupted by Irving and Billy.
It’s an amazing disruption, and Jackson Nicoll gives a performance-within-a-performance that is the comic highlight of the film.