Racist, homophobic, misogynistic... Robert De Niro's apocalyptically unfunny new comedy makes Little Fockers look like Taxi Driver
Dirty Grandpa brings us to a point in film history that might be called the De Niro Nadir-o. Over the last decade or so, good Robert De Niro films have become conspicuously thinner on the ground, but this hellish gross-out comedy, in which a horny widower takes his soon-to-be-married grandson on a libidinous road trip, marks a new, cosmologically low career ebb.
The most depressing thing about Dirty Grandpa isn’t that De Niro sleepwalks through it, as he has done other recent disasters. It’s that he doesn’t. Set aside the actor’s incongruously decent work with the director David O. Russell, and this is the most engaged De Niro performance in at least five years: his dialogue is both apocalyptically unfunny and clearly enunciated, which somehow makes it all the more galling.
His character, Dick, is a recent widower, and the film begins at his late wife’s funeral, where he soberly asks his strait-laced grandson Jason (Zac Efron) to drive him down to a Florida beach resort the couple used to frequent, for old time’s sake. Jason agrees, but it immediately becomes clear that Dick wants to use the trip to bed a nubile college girl and thereby end his 15-year dry streak.
This quest takes the pair to the party town of Daytona Beach, much to the horror of Jason’s fiancée (Julianne Hough), a nagging, uptight, status-obsessed shrew who might as well have been written by a Men’s Rights Activist focus group.
The script, by first-time screenwriter John Phillips, is certainly a piece of work: to borrow from Douglas Adams, it’s comprised entirely of lines that are almost, but not quite, entirely unlike jokes. The cast do a lot of shouting about rape, paedophilia, bestiality, gun violence and class-A drugs, but there aren’t any punchlines as such: perhaps the thinking ran that the inherent hilariousness of these topics simply rendered them unnecessary.
One comic set-piece involves De Niro repeatedly saying "nigger" in a crowded club with a largely black clientele; another involves his grandson walking in on him while he watches pornography in a reclining chair. In both cases, part of the gag is that you can’t believe the one-time star of Mean Streets and Raging Bull is sinking this low – except anyone who saw, say, Little Fockers won’t have any trouble accepting it at all.
Mid-trip, Dick and Jason cross the paths of two female students on spring break: Lenore (Aubrey Plaza), who’s on a mission to sleep with a professor and therefore becomes De Niro’s unlikely love interest, and Shadia (Zoey Deutch), a photographer with a social conscience who gives Jason a glimpse of the lush pastures that await were he to bail on his coming marriage.
They’re accompanied by Bradley (Jeffrey Bower-Chapman), their black and gay best friend, who immediately becomes a useful target for Dick’s barrages of racist and homophobic invective. Later in the film, Dick will heroically rescue Bradley from an evil street gang, although their menacing behaviour is not discernibly different from Dick’s earlier, played-for-laughs ranting.
The director is Dan Mazer, a former collaborator of Sacha Baron Cohen’s and the co-writer of Borat and Brüno, which is enough to make you weep. Dirty Grandpa might superficially look like those films – but in its vain digital airbrushing of its cast’s bodies, downward-punching humour and frequent lurches into sentimentality, it’s actually their factory-farmed, tranquillised opposite.
This may not end up being the worst film of the year, but 2016’s turkeys have a lot to live down to.
The most depressing thing about Dirty Grandpa isn’t that De Niro sleepwalks through it, as he has done other recent disasters. It’s that he doesn’t. Set aside the actor’s incongruously decent work with the director David O. Russell, and this is the most engaged De Niro performance in at least five years: his dialogue is both apocalyptically unfunny and clearly enunciated, which somehow makes it all the more galling.
His character, Dick, is a recent widower, and the film begins at his late wife’s funeral, where he soberly asks his strait-laced grandson Jason (Zac Efron) to drive him down to a Florida beach resort the couple used to frequent, for old time’s sake. Jason agrees, but it immediately becomes clear that Dick wants to use the trip to bed a nubile college girl and thereby end his 15-year dry streak.
This quest takes the pair to the party town of Daytona Beach, much to the horror of Jason’s fiancée (Julianne Hough), a nagging, uptight, status-obsessed shrew who might as well have been written by a Men’s Rights Activist focus group.
The script, by first-time screenwriter John Phillips, is certainly a piece of work: to borrow from Douglas Adams, it’s comprised entirely of lines that are almost, but not quite, entirely unlike jokes. The cast do a lot of shouting about rape, paedophilia, bestiality, gun violence and class-A drugs, but there aren’t any punchlines as such: perhaps the thinking ran that the inherent hilariousness of these topics simply rendered them unnecessary.
One comic set-piece involves De Niro repeatedly saying "nigger" in a crowded club with a largely black clientele; another involves his grandson walking in on him while he watches pornography in a reclining chair. In both cases, part of the gag is that you can’t believe the one-time star of Mean Streets and Raging Bull is sinking this low – except anyone who saw, say, Little Fockers won’t have any trouble accepting it at all.
They’re accompanied by Bradley (Jeffrey Bower-Chapman), their black and gay best friend, who immediately becomes a useful target for Dick’s barrages of racist and homophobic invective. Later in the film, Dick will heroically rescue Bradley from an evil street gang, although their menacing behaviour is not discernibly different from Dick’s earlier, played-for-laughs ranting.
The director is Dan Mazer, a former collaborator of Sacha Baron Cohen’s and the co-writer of Borat and Brüno, which is enough to make you weep. Dirty Grandpa might superficially look like those films – but in its vain digital airbrushing of its cast’s bodies, downward-punching humour and frequent lurches into sentimentality, it’s actually their factory-farmed, tranquillised opposite.
This may not end up being the worst film of the year, but 2016’s turkeys have a lot to live down to.
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