Dirty Grandpa

A Bad Joke with a Pulse

A movie like Dirty Grandpa doesn’t stumble into your lap so much as swagger in late, reeking of cheap beer and trying very hard to seem harmless. That’s part of the joke, I suppose. Dan Mazer’s 2016 comedy is built on a premise that sounds like an exhausted dare from a studio meeting — old man, young man, spring break, disaster — and yet what’s strange about it is how often it pauses, almost shyly, to ask whether any of this frat-boy noise is actually doing anyone any good.

I went in expecting a broad, ugly machine of a movie, and yes, it is broad and often ugly. But I kept noticing the little tonal slips. Mazer, who came out of the Borat school of provocation, doesn’t direct this like a clean, well-oiled comedy.

He lets scenes run a touch too long, as if embarrassment itself were the punchline. That strategy works better than it should in the first half. When Robert De Niro’s Dick starts needling Zac Efron’s Jason, the movie has a mischievous rhythm: one man is all impulse, the other all restraint, and the friction between them gives the film the only real engine it has.

The trouble is that the engine keeps idling in place. Every time it seems ready to become something sharper — a rueful generational comedy, maybe, about the absurdness of living as if youth were a moral virtue — it sprints back toward bodily-function gags and spring-break provocation.

That was the conversation around the film when it came out, and it wasn’t subtle. People argued about taste, age, misogyny, whether De Niro’s presence in something this lewd was funny, embarrassing, or a little of both. I think the reason the movie irritated so many viewers is also the reason it can’t be dismissed quite so easily: it puts one of American cinema’s great stern faces inside a farce that refuses to respect him.

De Niro spent decades as a man whose glare could freeze a room. Here, he weaponizes that same face for raunchy nonsense. Sometimes the result is funny because it’s so improbable.

Sometimes it just feels like a legendary actor slumming in a very loud hall of mirrors. Both things can be true.

The movie’s best stretch — and I’m not sure “best” is the right word, but it’s the one I kept remembering — is the road-trip sequence where the impossible pairing of Dick and Jason is finally forced into a shared space. That’s where Mazer understands blocking as comedy. De Niro leans forward into shots with that small, aggressive hunch he’s used for years now, his body still carrying the memory of menace even when he’s saying something stupid.