Dirty Grandpa gets off to a loathsome start and never lets up. Opening during Jason's (Zac Efron) grandma's funeral, a couple jokes about 'dogs fucking' fly that practically beg the audience "Please think this is funny!" When we're introduced to the dirty grandpa aka Dick (De Niro), he seems innocent enough, but in the very next scene Jason catches him furiously jerking off to porn without any regard to his surroundings. After this tee-off, the film is essentially a contest to get Robert De Niro to say the the sleaziest things possible (he checks the boxes for racism, misogyny, and homophobia within a few seconds) and perform the creepiest (and rapiest) endeavors.
It's almost as if the writers had a group of 12-year-olds compile as many innuendoes, puns, and potty jokes about balls and vaginas as they could and then turned it into a movie script (I mean, there are HUNDREDS of them here). The film doesn't seem to have a solid target audience either. It's way too raunchy and appalling for old-time De Niro fans, too eye-rollingly stupid for millennials (even the college bros will probably be turned off by this one), and the 12-year-olds that made the movie won't be allowed to see it without an accompanying adult (now that might actually be funny). Instead, it seems to be aimed toward criminal perverts that you wouldn't want to be alone with in the same theater.
We know that Zac Efron has some surprisingly good comic timing (as he demonstrated in Neighbors), but in Dirty Grandpa he actually seems like a piece of cardboard with abs. Then there's Aubrey Plaza, who is usually wonderfully endearing with her offbeat and awkward chops, but she's nearly unbearable here. A movie this bad still isn't going to tarnish De Niro's legacy, but it'll definitely make us question his later career choices. The character has somewhat of an arc eventually but it kind of just comes out of nowhere, so it feels incredibly forced--not really upending anything that came before.
I wouldn't recommend going to see this. But if you do, be sure to take a shower right after.
1/10
I thought this one looked alright. Sad to see that it dropped the ball. I've been really disappointed in comedies the last few years. (Although I enjoyed Spy and Trainwreck from last year)
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