Grandpa is not just dirty, it’s also sexist, ageist, racist ...
We like a shot of a naked penis right up in your face as much as the next guy, but it’s not enough to make us laugh — sorry, Dirty Grandpa.
This is a movie that desperately wants to be a raunchy, politically incorrect, gross-out comedy. It gets as far as desperate.
Hobbled by sitcom plotting and painfully obvious comic setups, Dirty Grandpa can also boast tonedeaf casting, heavy-handed writing and the mistaken belief that putting the F-word into the wrong mouth can be funny. Maybe the first time it can be. Not the 847th.
Robert De Niro is Dick Kelly, the filthy old man in question — his name is Dick! That’s funny already! — and Zac Efron is Jason Kelly, his buttoned-down corporate lawyer grandson. The movie opens with family photos of the two hanging out during Jason’s childhood, so you know they used to be tight; in present day, Grandpa’s just been widowed and Jason is a totally uptight dweeb with a hectoring fiancee (Julianne Hough), and a dull life.
Grandpa engineers a road trip. He wants to go to Boca Raton, and he insists Jason must drive him there. But the old guy has an agenda. Gramps knows that under that uptight exterior, Jason is still a free spirit. He doesn’t want Jason to settle for a dull life and the wrong wife, and he knows that he can set Jason free with enough booze, drugs, parties and nubile coeds. Instead of going to Boca Raton, he manipulates Jason into driving to Daytona Beach, where young women in bikinis frolic in slow motion.
This is a grandpa who thinks nothing of putting a few Xanax into Jason’s beer, so Jason will chill out. Come on — everyone knows date rape drugs are funny!
If you squint, you could maybe see a Colin Quinn or a Billy Bob Thornton pulling off this role, not that either is old enough.
As for the rest of the cast, you know how actors such as Quinn and Dave Attell and Tilda Swinton floated through the movie Trainwreck, and their characters made sense in the story, and it was seamless and hilarious?
That’s exactly what doesn’t happen in Dirty Grandpa. Jason Mantzoukas turns up as a stoner, Parks and Recreation’s Mo Collins is a wiseacre cop, Adam Pally is an idiot psycho cousin and Aubrey Plaza is a dense nympho undergrad — actually, Aubrey Plaza may be the only amusing character in the whole thing.
Dirty Grandpa relies on the justin-case approach to storytelling. The movie concerns a grandfather and his grandson and the importance of their relationship. But just in case that’s not enough, it’s also a road movie, a buddy film, a spring break romp, a romantic comedy, a stoner laff riot, a mistaken-identity farce, a feel-good family dramedy and a sexist, racist, ageist, weirdo, macho, patriotic jambalaya.