Film Review: Too Offensive to be Funny; ‘Dirty Grandpa’ Quickly Outstays its Welcome

By Anthony Hernandez

This is one of those films that had me looking at my watch after every scene wondering when the credits would finally roll (and it has a run time of less than 2 hours). I could not wait for this ugly movie to end.

The premise of Dirty Grandpa is merely an excuse for an increasingly offensive series of sequences and confrontations that use a character’s ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, body type, age, and anything else you can think of as the butt of mostly ill-timed, and unfunny jokes. Most of the dialogue is a bunch of incoherent garbage spewing out of a dirty old man’s mouth. Robert De Niro plays Dick (how fitting), a grandfather whose wife just passed away – and now all he wants to do is, well… you’ll get the idea. Zac Efron plays his grandson Jason – a straight-laced twenty-something who works at his father’s law firm (but once had a dream to be a photographer, or something).

Jason is supposed to be getting married to Meredith, who is nothing more than a nagging grab-bag of clichés that requires Jason to be at her every beckon call. And so far, Jason has tolerated it – that is until he goes on this “life-changing journey of self-discovery”, which was supposed to be him driving his grandfather to his home in Florida, but instead they end up in Daytona Beach, where all the debauchery unfolds.

There is a running gag where Dick is constantly poking an unsuspecting Jason in the butt with his thumb. This pretty much describes the feeling you get when watching this movie. The film is nothing more than an excuse to be nasty, all under the guise of a “good natured ribbing”. This Dirty Grandpa has no room for political correctness, which can actually be a good thing, if done with even just a little bit of grace – but it loses all credibility when it laces everything up inside a ball of supreme nastiness and a false pretense of some kind of journey of self-discovery. All of the jokes are crass. All of the feelings of empathy you might have toward Jason are false (especially when he meets his new love interest, which is supposed to somehow make the audience empathize with these characters and makes everything “all better” in the end).

The only redeeming sequence involves a scene where Dick visits an old pal named Stinky (Danny Glover) at a retirement home, only to find that his friend (who may have been just as dirty as Dick at one point) only has a month to live. This leaves Dick with nothing much else left in the world to hold on to. It actually shows a character’s impermanence – even this morally reprehensible one. It is the only time the film has something to say; but it is lost as the next raunchy scene unfolds.

Dirty Grandpa doesn’t earn the laughs it gets. I do not recommend this movie to anyone.

Dirty Grandpa

Run Time: 102 minutes

Rated R for crude sexual content throughout, graphic nudity, and for language and drug use

Starring: Zac Efron, Robert De Niro, Aubrey Plaza, Zoey Deutch, Julianne Hough, Dermot Mulroney

Director: Dan Mazer

Writers: John Phillips