Directed by Dan Mazar from a screenplay by John Phillips
This was my first promo screening this year, the only one I tried for so far, and it turned out to be an entertaining watch. I told someone I hoped it would be like Bad Santa, and when I looked it up while waiting on the screening to start - yes! Written by the team who brought you Bad Santa and Borat, among others. :D
First the good - it's rude as fuck, and really funny - I laughed a lot. It's sexy, silly, and sweet, and it has anti-materialistic, and follow your bliss, heart positive, along with sex positive values. And in spite of the rudecrudeness, it's very family values oriented too. De Niro and Efron have the most screen time, but I thought the scenes with the supporting characters had the best humour. Aubrey Plaza kills, as an unashamed girl on the make, with that inimitable dead pan delivery of the filthiest lines. She's got that schtick down pat. Adam Pally plays the most inappropriate cousin ever, and Jason Mantzoukas is an over the top ridiculous drug dealer with the best connections.
Now for the bad - it's super white bread, with a trajectory you can see a mile off, and it's chock full of stereotypes standing in for real people. The plot has Zac Efron as Jason Kelly, a thwarted photographer pushed into business law, who's about to get married to a horribly shallow fiance, in order to solidify his father's as well as his own career. Robert De Niro, Dick - of course that's his name - Kelly, wants to rescue him from that doom, by taking him on a spring break road trip to Florida. Dirty Grandpa is an old school "real" man, ex-military type, reifying and endorsing paternalistic, patriarchal values, where women are sexual objects, and/or mothers, men bond by insulting and abusing each other, while shoring up their masculinity identities by putting down queers and women. All that's framed as right on, men being men, kinda shit.
That it's casually and constantly homophobic was also irksome, especially since the way the token queer character is handled is supposed to redeem De Niro's queer-baiting commentary.
Dirty Grandpa spends all his interactions with this lone queer character, Tyrone, (Brandon Mychal Smith), making fun of him, until he witnesses him being harassed in a bar, by a group of homophobic and hostile black men. Tyrone isn't capable of defending himself, of course - It's De Niro to the rescue - with the aid of his Grandson - teaching Zac the importance of taking a punch to the face, and defeating them with his mad special ops skills - nobody makes fun of that queer but me! Later he charms the same thuggy men with his weed and Wu Tang knowledge, because that's what black people respect, I guess. White man to the rescue! And that's another thing - the big reveal on Dick Kelly is that he was training insurgents during his military career, not just being a mechanic like his family thought. Hmmm, I read that as unacknowledged superhero man, but the fact that De Niro has to keep that shit on the down low, and his country got major blowback in the form of 9-11 is pretty right on in terms of condemning those values. There was a scene where De Niro gives a major head injury to a jerky jock and that was just way too much too. I dunno. I'm on the fence about this movie - is it condemning mas macho? Kinda sorta depends on whether you agree with those values or not, I guess.
Finally, I was totally squicked by a scene where a father sees his child interacting with Zac Efron in a way that looks sexually abusive, even though it's totally innocent, and also some by the way Aubrey Plaza fetishized De Niro's oldness. Tell me that you've fallen and you can't get up - ridiculous right??? I might be reacting on an ageist level there, but it seemed like the implication was she was recreating previous sexual abuse. In both cases I laughed, but there was definite discomfort - why da F did you go there??? - in my laughter too. I'm uncomfortable when sexual abuse is made light of. :(
It's such a dumb movie that it's hard to take any of it seriously, though, and I think most people who will watch this, won't notice any of the things I took issue with. And that's kinda sad, because the patriarchy is invisible almost always to the people who uphold it.
