TL;DR – What an awful steaming pile of effluent this move was, at best it is lazy, at worse it is deeply problematic, don’t waste your money on this.

Score – 1 out of 5 stars

Review –

Dirty Grandpa is a film about a recent widower taking his grandson on a trip to Daytona Beach, there is more to the story, but I could not be bothered to explain it.

The film employs comedy like a jump scare in a bad horror film, an attempt to shock you into laughter through gross-out jokes and imagery. Which means that it ends up being a pale imitation of a comedy film, because sure you’ll laugh but only really as an involuntary action, which makes you feel really unpleasant afterwards.

This is not even touching on the incredibly problematic issues with the film. There is a sequence where a mostly nude Zac Efron wakes up on the beach after a night partying on numerous hard drugs wearing only a soft toy fanny pack over his genitalia. At which point a young child comes up asking to play with the soft toy, the parent only sees this from behind and think Zac Efron is molesting their child and then “hilarity ensues”. On the one hand, how the ‘insert adjective of your choice’ does this even make it through the scripting phase, and on the other how do you actually film it when it is clearly a mostly nude Zac Effron and a child in the same scene, seriously how do you mitigate the welfare issues of the actor in that situation. This is but one of the several really problematic scenes in this film, like police letting a suspect that sells hard drugs to primary school children go because they like him.

In conclusion, don’t waste your money on this film, in fact, don’t give any money to the filmmakers, if you want to go out, go bowling instead, ten pins or lawn, either works, it will be a much better use of your time and money.

By Brian MacNamara: You can follow Brian on Twitter Here, when he’s not chatting about Movies and TV, he’ll be talking about International Relations, or the Solar System.

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Directed by – Dan Mazer
Written by – John M Philips
Starring – Robert De Niro, Zac Efron, Aubrey Plaza, Zoey Deutch, Julianne Hough & Dermot Mulroney
Rating – Australia: MA15+; Canada: 14A; Ireland: 18; NZ: R16; UK: 15; USA: R