Jason Kelly (Zac Efron) is a week away from getting married when his recently widowed grandfather (Robert DeNiro) asks him to drive him down to Florida to play golf. Surprise! Grandpa is really looking to party hard and Jason – the most uptight man alive – is along for the ride.
Everybody knows what to expect from a Robert DeNiro movie these days – and it’s not big laughs. This is too busy trying to be offensively funny (it tries so hard it’s more like a potty-mouthed little kid) to give the Oscar-winner anything more to work with than swear words and Aubrey Plaza grinding against him as a college student looking to score with a pensioner.
Still DeNiro is always watchable, while Efron is game for the endless humiliations on offer. But even his charm can’t save this from being one of the grimmest comedies seen on the big screen in recent years. Most scenes have one brief funny moment that just makes everything else more painful. For a 90-minute movie that feels like three hours, there’s maybe 10 watchable minutes here: one of them is DeNiro singing Ice Cube’s ‘It Was a Good Day’, while another sees him listing the members of the Wu-Tang Clan, so you may disagree on the definition of “watchable”.
Reviewed by Anthony Morris
