Movie Review: Dirty Grandpa
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- How shockingly horrendous and aggressively unfunny is Dirty Grandpa? Let's put it this way.
If you set out to make an offensive, bottom-dwelling entertainment with the sole intention of embarrassing the cast and the audience, I doubt you could top it.
Okay, bottom it.
This odd-couple comedy about a grandfather and a grandson that teams Robert De Niro and Zac Efron isn't godawful because it's raunchy or profane or vulgar or nonsensical or awkward or insulting or humiliating. All of which it most certainly is.
It's because it's laughless. It's because it's clueless. It's because it's painful to sit through. It's because you never stop wincing. It's because it doesn't squander on-screen talent so much as squash it.
Other than that, it's a joy to behold. On paper, teaming De Niro and Efron is a promising proposition.After all, this is a revered six-time Oscar nominee and two-time Oscar winner sharing screen time and space with a musically talented and enormously popular teen idol.
Living legend bonds with up-and-coming superstar. What could go wrong?
Only everything.
Efron plays Jason Kelly, a straight-laced, mild-mannered, ambitious lawyer one week away from his wedding to his boss's daughter, a controlling fiance played by Zoey Deutch, all part of getting himself on the fast track for a partnership at the law firm headed by his father and father-in-law.
Then Jason's grandmother passes away. At the funeral, Jason sees his grandfather, a wild and foul-mouthed former soldier played by De Niro, for the first time in years and agrees to embark on a road trip to Daytona Beach for spring break – where all the young women are -- the day after the funeral.
Why? Because, as his grandfather explains, his late wife told him on her deathbed to "get back out there," although chances are she didn't mean the very next day.
On the trip, Jason comes to learn that his grandfather opposes his marriage to this particular woman.
In Florida, they party on the beach, get in fights at bars, and engage in karaoke contests, and – oh, what's the difference?
Director Dan Mazer (I Give It a Year), whose background is mostly as a television producer, leaves his co-leads – whom we spend the majority of our time feeling sorry for -- out to dry as he works from a screenplay by John Phillips that sounds as if it was written by a preadolescent who had just been given a laundry list of naughty words that he was instructed to work into the dialogue.
And when the internal-logic-ignoring script takes a left turn in the third act and suddenly begins embracing sentiment, it's all you can do to keep your lunch down.
It's still January, but consider this an early candidate to take worst-movie-of-the-year dishonors.
So we'll drive 1/2-a-star out of 4 for a lower-than-lowbrow romp that becomes intolerable in record time. Efron's grandson and De Niro's grandfather are the only things grand about Dirty Grandpa.