Last Updated on August 2, 2021
PLOT: An uptight young lawyer goes on a road trip with his grandpa. Along the way they swear a lot, hit on young girls, and discover something about each other. Who cares about any of it?
REVIEW: DIRTY GRANDPA starts off fittingly enough at a funeral – and the laughs are about as dead as the deceased grandmother. At one point during the funeral, the character played by Julianne Hough insists that her fiancé – played of course by Zac Efron – picks out a tie or something for the wedding. Guess what? Her character is a shallow moron asking garment advice when the love of her life is burying his grandmother. You see where this is going? Old guy takes a young guy out, mostly against his will, and soon they discover new things about themselves. Or just some crap like that. It has all been done before, and it has been done MUCH better than this. The jokes are lazy and they mostly consist of Robert De Niro, or whoever is talking, saying f*ck a lot or making terrible puns. Yes, this is an abysmal flick.
I guess we should talk about the plot. Jason Kelly (Efron) is a young and successful attorney and he is supposed to get married to a bland chick named Meredith (Hough). Unfortunately for Jason, he is unwittingly forced to escort his widowed grandfather Dick Kelly (De Niro) somewhere – I don’t remember where and it doesn’t matter. It turns out that Dick just wants to finally live a wild life and screw some bikini clad hottie. And good old grandpa apparently thinks the change would do his grandson Jason some good. The two end up heading to Florida for Spring Break with a few stops on the way. During their excursion, Jason meets a pretty girl named Shadia (Zoey Deutch) who he went to school with. He's also naked quite a bit, gets wasted and thrown in jail, and has all sorts of shenanigans. And it's ridiculously pathetic.
Where do I start? First things first, I do want to clarify that I like comedies that are un-PC and make the audience a little bit uncomfortable. This flick takes things like mistaken pedophilia (a little boy has a close encounter with an stuffed bee on Efron’s privates), stereotypes of all sorts, and of course drugs, and manages to make it all really f*cking dull. If you are going to take on offensive material you might want to try and make it funny. Aside from maybe a couple of jokes in-between the barrage of dimwit word play, there is nothing worth laughing at here. It takes too long and you know exactly where it's going. It’s utterly predictable from the second the bimbo starts asking her fiancé about ties at his grandmother’s funeral. What the hell?!?
My other major issues is that I like nearly every single person in the cast. Efron has been much better than this in other films. De Niro plays an unlikable a-hole with no real regard for anybody else, and he is fine considering the awful script. The real disappointment is watching the lovely Aubrey Plaza take on her terrible role. She is the horny girl who really wants to screw an older man, and De Niro fits the bill. The actress is so much better than this but it would be impossible for anybody to make this work. As for the rest of the cast, Jason Mantzoukas is one of the few cast members that was slightly entertaining.
Directed by Dan Mazer and written by John Phillips, it is not surprising they didn’t want critics reviewing this too soon. It is absolutely THAT bad. At one point, Shadia meets up with a group of activists – and yes, they looked like hippies and drove a bus – because she is going to take photographs of their adventures. At that point in the film I was sort of hoping that this would turn into THE GREEN INFERNO and a group of cannibals would finish everybody off. It would have been far more entertaining then watching this mess of a movie.
DIRTY GRANDPA is certainly dirty. It’s crude and rude, and that would’ve been great if it had offered a few laughs. It doesn’t. At all. Efron and De Niro aren’t bad necessarily, but they have nothing to work with. The very charming Plaza plays the one-note slut for old people character but it’s a complete waste of her talents. And then there is Hough, who portrays a sour and annoying woman. When she was on-screen I was just counting how many times her hair was in her face. Look, if you want to offend audiences and make sick jokes – the thing with the child was definitely in bad taste – at least have a few laughs with it. Is there anything to recommend about DIRTY GRANDPA? Well, there are a few… nope, never mind, there is not a damn thing that I can recommend from this atrocity of a movie.
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