Those of us grieving for the career of Robert De Niro have (while tolerating the odd decent cameo in a David O Russell flick) stopped wishing for any sort of late-career masterpiece. He has been appearing in appalling films for much longer than he appeared in classics. Robert De Niro is an actor in bad films.
That’s what he does. Yes, he may have once dallied with quality cinema. Ronnie Kray did a few paintings in prison. That didn’t make him Willem de Kooning. The most we can hope for is, perhaps, that De Niro now appears in a film so revoltingly cankerous that it poisons the creative bloodstream and shocks him back into relative sense.
Where were we? Oh Jesus. Dirty Grandpa. I’d almost managed to convince myself it didn’t exist. Despite what you may have heard, the film isn’t quite bad enough to meet the criterion above. Indeed, thanks to Ride Along 2, it doesn’t even register as the worst American comedy released this month. It is, by the debased standards of 21st century De Niro, only ordinarily terrible.
The likable Zac Efron plays a young lawyer tentatively looking forward to marrying an archetypal Bridezilla. A week before the “rehearsal brunch”, he attends his grandmother’s funeral and is persuaded to drive her widower to Florida for one last fling. When Zac calls round to pick up Bob (for it is he), the old man is pleasuring himself to porn while breakfasting on Johnny Walker.
We soon realise that the geezer is good for gear. “I want to fuck a horse and drink its blood,” Grandpa says in one particularly baffling moment.
This may not count as a recommendation, but Dirty Grandpa plays like one of those dire mainstream films that - thanks to a few extreme moments - Quentin Tarantino periodically reclaims in his best-of-the-year list. Its uncomplicated pleasures are few: game turns by Efron and Aubrey Plaza; the bit where Zac, unknowingly wearing a swastika on his forehead, FaceTimes a rabbi.
But it is bad in a defiantly odd way. The film never adequately explains Grandpa’s deviant psychology. He just seems to have quietly gone bonkers after 40 years of comparatively sober married life. That strangeness does set it aside from the pack just a little.
So, The ultimate De Niro pustule has not yet swollen up. Give it another year.
