Review of Dirty Grandpa (2016) by Brian R — 24 Jan 2016

Omg horrible. Don't look in your lunch bag: Zac Efron is trying to act his way out of it.

I hope De Niro got a big payday for this garbage. The director, Dan Mazer, who should know better because he's worked with Sacha Baron Cohen,made a movie so wooden that you might have thought it was a junior level film school project.

Bad casting decision to use Efron, who has ZERO sense for comedy at all. People here at the iPic Boca Raton?, in the town where grandpa is allegedly heading, were laughing AT the movie, not with it: About the "shiksa" they cast to be Efron's Jewish girlfriend, Julianne Hough. About the line the drop dead model-grade hippie love interest, Zoey Deutch drops about being uncomfortable with how she looks on camera. Aubrey Plaza was the only one in this stillborn sitcom who got a laugh regularly and that was in spite of, not because of, the script.

Poor Adam Pally, tasked to be Zach Galifianakis, couldn't breathe life into the moribund writing. John Phillips should be happy there is no tribunal for bad screenplays otherwise, for this paint-by-numbers formulaic trash, he'd be at the Haig for Crimes Against Comedy.

Friends in Daytona said that they would dream of seeing that many college kids back there for Spring. Hasn't been like that for years.

This is one of the classic problems of Hollywood filmmaking: You have to suspend disbelief. All that Efron and Mazer can do, though, is seem to cause the bullshit meter to go off. The script has every predictable plot turn of bad comedy, and instead of leaving with a pleasant smile, you're feeling like the theater should offer you a freebie to make up for spending good money for such horrible filmmaking.