Dirty Grandpa is built almost entirely around the comedic value of seeing old people behave badly. To this film, there is nothing funnier than a foul-mouthed septuagenarian that openly declares his intention to sleep with a college girl. And this by itself is not really a bad premise for a comedy. The problem is that at the same time, the script seems to have pretensions of teaching life lessons. Like so many mainstream "raunchy" comedies, Dirty Grandpa doesn't seem to understand that the usual mainstream narrative formulas don't quite work when a story is built on people generally being awful.
Corporate lawyer Jason (Zac Efron) is all set to get married within the month when his recently widowed Grandpa Dick (Robert de Niro) asks him to drive him down to Florida. What should have been a simple trip down South turns into something else, as it turns out that Dick intends to get laid on the trip. The straight laced Jason struggles to keep up with his apparently sex-crazed grandfather as he picks up college girls, parties, gets drunk, takes drugs, picks fights, and inevitably gets his grandson into all sorts of trouble.
The movie makes it clear from the very start that Jason is heading into a disaster with this marriage. This is expressed early on in a scene that has his fiancée asking him whether he would prefer to wear a salmon or a coral tie. Because obviously, only a monster would ask a man what color tie he’d prefer to wear. The movie then mostly continues to make the case that Jason is a boring person heading to a boring life being controlled by his terrible wife. And so we must be glad that he has this crazy grandfather that is willing to go out of his way to save him from this dreadful fate.
If Dirty Grandpa was just a movie about a pervy old man and his grandson partying their way through spring break, it probably wouldn’t be very good, either. But it might have come out a tad more inspired. At the very least, the movie could have sustained its craziness for a bit longer. The most tedious bits of this movie all have to do with Jason’s marriage, as there is absolutely no doubt how it’s going to turn out. The lazy writing treats this whole thing as an obligation; just something the movie has to get through. There are hardly even any jokes whenever Jason’s fiancée is on screen.
The other parts of the movie are slightly better, but that isn’t really saying much. The filmmaking is pretty bad, scenes with more than two participants often becoming incoherent. Occasionally, the movie flirts with a level of insanity that’s actually kind of interesting. For the most part, however, it just leans of Robert De Niro saying terrible things. To be completely fair, De Niro doesn’t sleep through this role, and delivers every terrible line with surprising conviction. Unfortunately, Zac Efron doesn’t keep up, the young actor just not very good in comedies. The best bits come from the periphery, with Aubrey Plaza and Jason Mantzoukas fully embracing the inanity of the film’s toxic premise, playing their roles with wild comedic abandon.
Dirty Grandpa is your standard mainstream raunchy comedy. It wants to appear edgy and shocking, and so it offers up a parade of bad behavior. But at its heart, it wants to be a mass market product. So there have to be good intentions underneath all the terrible things that are done by the characters. It’s a combination that hardly ever works, and apart from a couple of fun performances, Dirty Grandpa is way too lazy to be an exception to that rule.
My Rating:
