Review of Dirty Grandpa (2016) by Cyanidedog — 18 Jul 2017

This is the kind of movie you go in to see with a particular mindset. You need the mindset of "I want to laugh my ass off at offensive, vulgar humor". It's the kind of movie where you aren't looking to find the best comedy of the year, no comedy is "great" anyways.

Sure a comedy can get one or two things right but they don't do any justice to movies as a whole. It all has to deal with the subjectivity of comedy. Humor is subjective and as such should not be held to a standard "comedy" it should all be rated on its own merits, separate from all other movies, even ones that are similar.

Bad Grandpa fails in quite a few places, I find Efron's performance to fall flat. He did do pretty decent in some of the scenes but not many. The big draws of this movie were Robert De Niro and Aubrey Plaza.

Not only were their characters hilarious and perfectly executed for most of the runtime, but they also had a chemistry going that made me believe these two could actually fall for each other. I think the most important fault in the movie was that they had Zac's character getting ready to be married and then falling for another girl, but they didn't have Zac's character's relationship being the main focus of the story.

Instead the main focus was De Niro's character's hijinks and the bond between his and Efron's characters. Thus the relationship between Zac Efron and Zoey Deutch's characters felt heavy handed and unnecessary.

While the character's arc was good, the execution made it feel less important. He was in a loveless relationship with an over-bearing, near abusive woman, and he got out by falling in love with someone else over the course of 3 days.

Cuz that's totally realistic and would make someone call off a marriage. All in all, Dirty Grandpa needs to be watched just to laugh about the comedy, it's offensive and yet done in a way that's realistic.

You look at the characters and most of the comedy done by most characters feels like an accurate portrayal of people in situations like that. This is not a movie to take seriously in the least. I loved it because this is my kind of humor and because, while the acting was stale in some cases, most of the actors and actresses did amazing jobs.