Review of Dirty Grandpa (2016) by Bttrmovies — 02 Feb 2016

"Right before his wedding, uptight lawyer Jason (Zac Efron) is tricked into driving his grandfather Dick (Robert De Niro), a perverted former Army general, to Florida for spring break." A movie with the title "Dirty Grandpa" can only be a certain type of movie, so you need to keep that in mind going into this. That being said, I can confidently say it's probably dirtier and raunchier than you would expect. I watched the red-band trailer before viewing it, and I was still surprised. I'll say right off the bat, I seem to have the unpopular opinion on this movie right now: I actually enjoyed it.

Let me start with what I liked about the film. With maybe one or two exceptions, I thought the acting in this was fairly good. De Niro really embraces the title role, dropping f-bombs at a rate he hasn't reached since his last Scorsese movie. He's also been an actor that has been known to phone it in from time to time in recent years, and Dirty Grandpa seemed to be a project where he seemed to be having fun playing this over-the-top filthy character. Zac Efron essentially plays the straight man to De Niro, and he does it well. There's one scene where he gets to let loose and it's refreshing to see that he hasn't lost his comedic chops since Neighbors (which he was remarkable in and gets to revisit this year in the upcoming sequel). The standouts, however, are two characters played by Jason Mantzoukas (The League) and Adam Pally (Happy Endings), who are two fairly big names in the alternative comedy scene. I happen to be a big fan of both, and it's nice to see them pop up in more movies that the general public sees. Mantzoukas plays Pam, a drug dealer who owns a merch shop on Daytona Beach, and he's basically a less-gross version of Rafi from The League. Pam is in more of the movie than I expected, which would be annoying had I not liked the character so much. Adam Pally plays Nick, Jason's crazy stoner cousin, who steals every scene he's in. The first few big laughs of the movie come from Nick, and unfortunately he doesn't really pop back up until the third act (save for one small scene over Skype midway through). The writing had some laugh-out-loud jokes that hit really well (at one point, Jason is referred to as a "Mitt Romney Terminator" based on his actions). I won't give away too many of the jokes, because some of them come out of left field and are funnier when unexpected.

However, the script is also where I start to get into what I didn't like. If you've seen pretty much any romantic comedy ever made, you know the storyline of this movie. As mentioned in the synopsis, Jason is about to get married to a very high-strung woman (played a bit flamboyantly by Julianne Hough). Very early on during their journey, Jason and Dick stop at a diner where a group of twentysomethings are sitting nearby. One of the group members is a girl that had a photography class with Jason in high school (you can probably already tell where it'll go from here). And what you think will happen indeed does happen, which is one of the movie's faults: it's very predictable. As soon as I saw the aforementioned diner scene unfold, I knew the roadmap for the rest of the movie. Also worth noting is that while most of the jokes worked for me some fell flat. Very flat. A few even teeter on being pretty offensive. And that's something you need to know going into this: if you are someone who is easily offended, dear god do NOT see this movie. It pulls no punches, and I can't help but feel it might have been better off it did pull a few.

Dirty Grandpa was one of the lowest-brow, hardest-R comedies I've seen in a long time, and you know what? I laughed my ass off. This is a dumb comedy that knows exactly what it is and who its fans are. Now granted, this certainly isn't for everyone, nor is it even close to a perfect movie.