'Dirty Grandpa' Trailer: A Movie Where Robert De Niro Tweaks Zac Efron's Nipples
It's hard to begrudge the 72-year old Robert De Niro for taking work and it's even harder to begrudge a young up-and-comer like Zac Efron from acting in any movie where he gets to work alongside a genuine living legend. It's just hard to feel good about Dirty Grandpa, which is certainly a movie that exists and was made by people and had a budget that allowed a hard-working crew to pay their mortgages and feed their families.
The final Dirty Grandpa trailer is here and it offers exactly what you'd expect from a movie titled Dirty Grandpa. Watch it below, if that is a thing that you want to do.
Directed by Dan Mazer (whose directorial credits include episodes of Da Ali G Show and the 2013's I Give It a Year) and written by John Phillips (who is writing the upcoming Bad Santa 2), Dirty Grandpa is built around a pretty straightforward joke: old men are shameless deviants who are totally out of f***s to give and are therefore ideal vessels for raunchy comedy. In this particular case, De Niro plays Dick, a recent widower who drags his strait-laced grandson Jason (Efron) to Daytona Beach during Spring Break. Naturally, Jason has a nagging fiancée and naturally Dick gets to teach him how to party and live it up and so on.
There is a shot in that trailer where De Niro, the legendary star of Mean Streets, The Godfather Part II, Taxi Driver, The Deer Hunter, Raging Bull, The King of Comedy, and Goodfellas, playfully tweaks Efron's nipples. Well, at least he's still full of surprises.
The supporting cast includes Julianne Hough, whose main job seems to be "supplier of angry, scornful reaction shots" and Aubrey Plaza, playing the kind of sexpot she's so successfully avoided playing on shows like Parks and Recreation and movies like Safety Not Guaranteed.
Let's just get honest here: Dirty Grandpa could be funny. The people making it have made funny stuff in the past. De Niro has been effective in his fair share of comedies and Efron, as we saw in Neighbors, is a natural comic talent. However, the January release date and the fact that every trailer released so far has been bereft of laughs is not good, to say the least. Nothing would please me more than to hear this movie is a laugh-riot worth experiencing on the big screen. We shall see.
Dirty Grandpa slides its greasy, sinewy self into theaters on January 22, 2016.