Movie Review: Dirty Grandpa

The logic that people will use when they go see this bad movie is, "Well, Robert De Niro is in it and he would never make a garbage movie, so it just has to be good". Unfortunately this is also the logic that I used when I decided to see this horrible movie. I could not be more surprised that an actor of the caliber of Robert De Niro could read a script like this, think it was funny or something, and then decide to make it. I often wonder when I see a very bad movie that there must be some kind of favor queue that producers, actors and directors have to endure just to stay in the field and keep making movies. They have to promise to give back a favor to someone who did them a favor in the past and to repay that favor they have to make a horrible movie. Not only is this movie never funny, its actually disgusting in a number of areas. There is one scene in particular at the beginning of this movie that you cannot believe De Niro agreed to play to perhaps even risk losing some of his hard earned respect in the field and some fans along the way.

You have to also wonder what is the count of bad movies an actor can make before his career is over. Zac Efron has made several extremely bad movies lately and you have to figure that he is close to ruining his career very soon after this latest disaster. He also seems to like being naked in many of his movies and for the 2nd time (the last time in the very bad movie Neighbors) he wears a puppet over his genital area as well as being unnecessarily naked in a good deal of this movie. Perhaps the reason for this is that the producers realize that this movie is so bad that the only way to get people to see it would be to have this actor naked so that at least young women might go see it. How about Efron having some kind of integrity or pride in himself as an actor and not make horrible movies like this where he is naked and in humiliating situations so many times. How bad do you want to be an actor? How bad do you need to make the big money? Is it worth humiliating yourself in front of millions of movie goers?

I was also surprised at the amazing overuse of the "F" word in this movie. De niro and Efron use this word probably 300 times, perhaps even coming close to breaking the over 500 "F" word Tally of the "Wolf of Wall Street", which came out in 2013. The fundamental issue I bring up again in this blog as I have mentioned before in this blog, "Is being raunchy always funny". The answer to this question of course is no and this movie proves this point as well as any movie ever has. Aubrey Plaza is a very funny actress but in this movie even she fails to get ever one laugh. There is a scene at a wedding reception where the actress Julianne Hough is on stage singing a song horrible (on purpose in a failed attempt to be funny) and Zac Efron's character is trying to tell her that the wedding is off through people in the audience. What followed was a horribly unfunny and lame attempt to communicate what Efron's character was telling his fiance through some handicapped and old people in the audience. This joke was milked far longer than it should have and from this very first attempt at stupid humor; it failed miserably.

This movie was supposed to be a comedy and nobody laughed in the audience, not even once.

Do yourself a favor and miss this horrible mess, one of the worst movies I have seen in a while.





Dirty Grandpa IMDB