Dirty Grandpa Review

Dirty Grandpa warms up with a nice photo montage of the two title characters (Robert De Niro and Zac Efron) throughout the years and the many memories they've shared. Flash forward to present time where Jason (Zac Efron) has become a tight lawyer that seems very hesitant in life and is getting married. On the other side of things the grandpa played by De Niro has just had his wife pass away and the family reconnects at the funeral.

Initially it seems like this is a nice story about a family getting back together, but it takes a massive dip the next morning when Jason goes to take his grandpa out for golfing. The character has instantly given up any grieving and is on the march to bed anyone that he can get his hands on and eventually settles on targeting a college girl through a series of events.

The pace is set early on in the house with a more disgusting and awkward moment than something that was actually funny. This trend continues on through the entirety of the film with even worse or at even levels of mostly cringe moments. The audience in the theater was largely silent aside from a couple laughs that were few and far between which is not generally good since it's supposed to be a comedic effort.

I'm even more puzzled that the two leads would be comfortable with their roles considering the weird sort of acts that were being done by each other and it was very odd for De Niro to be doing this sort of acting. When it comes to the actual plot of the movie it was basically the classic family tries to bring the fun out of a boring individual about to wed. Building on that Jason comes across someone from his past and develops emotions for that individual.

This is all fine though there really is no reason for the two to really connect through the movie aside from just being in the same room a few times and that felt really forced by the end when a huge random decision was made. It was also really awkward seeing Aubrey Plaza’s Lenore (the college girl De Niro is trying to sleep with) continually being outlandishly sexual in the direction of De Niro and his general obsession with having sex with her. This builds throughout the entire movie with many similar scenes and it eventually ended with what might have been one of the worst movie send-offs I've ever seen.

There were also many comments on Jason being a lesbian throughout which is never explained and far too many penis jokes. Aside from this main crop of characters the supporting cast was just as bad being set pieces for recycled jokes. There was one character in particular named Pam that was really annoying throughout the film being the token drug dealer that somehow shows up everywhere and just basically does what he wants as the police never care about his actions. This was just part of the problem of a very poorly put together film that just stumbles along.

The Conclusion

Dirty Grandpa was an awful film filled with so many clichés that I couldn't even begin to count them. The general plot was odd and the humor of the movie was mostly not funny at all. I'm younger and still didn't appreciate the vast majority of the material with the theater being very quiet for the showing.

There was no motive for what happened at any point of the movie and the characters were just thrown together to provide a continued joke, vast majority of which weren't entertaining. This is was definitely one of the worst films I've seen and was basically one large cringe fest across the entire viewing.

Dirty Grandpa Review at Theater with Standard Viewing

Rating Overall: 2.0