Dirty Grandpa (15.)
Directed by Dan Mazar.
Starring Robert De Niro, Zac Efron, Zoe Deutch, Aubrey Plaza, Julianne Hough and Jason Mantzoukas. 102 mins.
De Niro was always funny. Right from the start, before he was famous in Greeting and Hi Mom, all the way through the heavyweight performances of the 70 and 80s, the ones that secured his place among the greatest screen actors ever, he displayed natural comic timing. Then in the 90s he started to do actual comedies and he has barely raised a smile since.
Dirty Grandpa, an unrelentingly lewd and crude comedy in which a recently bereaved granddad goes on a road trip to Florida with his uptight lawyer grandson (Efron) in an attempt to get laid, is something of a change of pace for De Niro: having spent this century lazily allowing it to fall into disrepute, this time he is taking an active part in trashing his reputation. This is the kind self-travestying role that Marlon Brando, the man whose mantle of greatest screen actor he took over, used to indulge in late on during his Fat period, an act of sabotage designed to alienate all those who once admired him.
Or maybe a better comparison would be Julie Andrews flashing her boobies in S.O.B. because I don't think you'll ever look at him in quite the same way again after this. For some this will be a step too far, but at least it looks like he's making a bit of effort, like there's some blood coursing through his veins again. Three years ago he made a cop film with 50 Cent that went straight to DVD – for De Niro the term A New Low is all relative.
Dirty Grandpa is at least funny in that Hangover/ House of Apatow/ “o.m.g, it's wrong on so many levels” kind of way. It is though so pleased with itself at having got De Niro to talk dirty that it overplays its hand. Every other line is some kind of sexually based insult. Also the contrivances needed to manipulate the pair into their various comic set pieces are so desperate they take a lot of the fun out of it. Most desperate of all is its attempts to make us think it has some depth, that it is about the poignancy of aging: do not go gently into that Spring Break pool party, make dick jokes against the dying of the light.
There is a certain ugly poignancy to it though. When Brando did this kind of thing he did it fearlessly and with no regard for his dignity. Watching 72-year-old De Niro chatting up teenage girls, flexing his muscles on the beach, doing Ice Cube tracks at Karaoke and getting caught masturbating, there is the distinct feeling that he thinks he is proving he's still down with the kids. Ah, sad grandpa.
De Niro reviews -
Everybody's Fine,
What Just Happened?
Silver Linings Playbook
Last Vegas
Midnight Run
Machete
Directed by Dan Mazar.
Starring Robert De Niro, Zac Efron, Zoe Deutch, Aubrey Plaza, Julianne Hough and Jason Mantzoukas. 102 mins.
De Niro was always funny. Right from the start, before he was famous in Greeting and Hi Mom, all the way through the heavyweight performances of the 70 and 80s, the ones that secured his place among the greatest screen actors ever, he displayed natural comic timing. Then in the 90s he started to do actual comedies and he has barely raised a smile since.
Dirty Grandpa, an unrelentingly lewd and crude comedy in which a recently bereaved granddad goes on a road trip to Florida with his uptight lawyer grandson (Efron) in an attempt to get laid, is something of a change of pace for De Niro: having spent this century lazily allowing it to fall into disrepute, this time he is taking an active part in trashing his reputation. This is the kind self-travestying role that Marlon Brando, the man whose mantle of greatest screen actor he took over, used to indulge in late on during his Fat period, an act of sabotage designed to alienate all those who once admired him.
Or maybe a better comparison would be Julie Andrews flashing her boobies in S.O.B. because I don't think you'll ever look at him in quite the same way again after this. For some this will be a step too far, but at least it looks like he's making a bit of effort, like there's some blood coursing through his veins again. Three years ago he made a cop film with 50 Cent that went straight to DVD – for De Niro the term A New Low is all relative.
Dirty Grandpa is at least funny in that Hangover/ House of Apatow/ “o.m.g, it's wrong on so many levels” kind of way. It is though so pleased with itself at having got De Niro to talk dirty that it overplays its hand. Every other line is some kind of sexually based insult. Also the contrivances needed to manipulate the pair into their various comic set pieces are so desperate they take a lot of the fun out of it. Most desperate of all is its attempts to make us think it has some depth, that it is about the poignancy of aging: do not go gently into that Spring Break pool party, make dick jokes against the dying of the light.
There is a certain ugly poignancy to it though. When Brando did this kind of thing he did it fearlessly and with no regard for his dignity. Watching 72-year-old De Niro chatting up teenage girls, flexing his muscles on the beach, doing Ice Cube tracks at Karaoke and getting caught masturbating, there is the distinct feeling that he thinks he is proving he's still down with the kids. Ah, sad grandpa.
De Niro reviews -
Everybody's Fine,
What Just Happened?
Silver Linings Playbook
Last Vegas
Midnight Run
Machete
