Bad Grandpa
“How’d you like a serving of Irving?” asks 86-year-old Irving Zisman, played by Johnny Knoxville (The Last Stand), to a congregation of women at a male strip club. Some blush, some laugh, and some stare wide-eyed at the camera. I won’t ruin what comes next, but it had me laughing harder than anything in recent memory.
In another scene, the senile man has his genitalia stuck in a soda vending machine and tries to get people to free him. The audience watches as gangs of people surround Zisman, phones out, recording but not helping. Finally, a manager tries to pull Irving away from the machine, stretching his plastic prosthetic member about 4 feet and sending the group of bystanders running away squealing.
That’s it. That’s the movie. Thrown in are some nongenuine emotional scenes about a budding relationship between a grandpa and a kid, but for the most part, it’s just Knoxville causing trouble in public under the guise of an 86-year-old man, as he has done in previous Jackass skits.
There’s just enough of a plot to keep the movie from turning into a disorganized mess. Irving Zisman must take his 8-year-old grandson, Billy, across the country to his father after Billy’s mother goes to jail.
On the whole, the film feels unoriginal. Preying on innocent bystanders, Bad Grandpa is Borat without the biting social commentary. There are some scenes that seem to expose the prejudices and less-than-saintly nature of American citizens, such as one in which Zisman persuades movers to help him put a body in the trunk or another in which Billy crashes a beauty pageant while dressed in drag, but it’s mainly Knoxville being a jackass in public to get reactions.
The film overdoses on the “old man makes ungodly sexual advances upon random women” gag, which appears in almost every segment. It’s mildly amusing at first, but comes to reek of desperation.
There are many parallels to Little Miss Sunshine as well, from the dead grandparent in the trunk of a car to crashing a beauty pageant with dirty dancing. The latter scene was almost a shot-for-shot remake of the 2006 indie classic. Yes, it was filmed in public, but I wish Knoxville and the crew had chosen to chart new territory. They certainly have the necessary creative talent.
That being said, I walked out of the theater with sore abdominal muscles. Though much of the film is contrived and predictable, when Bad Grandpa soars, oh boy does it soar. In particular, the aforementioned scene at the strip club and a funeral segment come to mind. There are scenes in this movie that had me laughing as hard as any other movie I’ve seen. There were parts in which I couldn’t even begin to hear the dialogue over the crowd’s roaring guffaws.
Jackson Nicoll (Fun Size), the child actor playing Billy, is surprisingly enjoyable. I’m usually annoyed with gimmicky child actors paraded around by films to attract the women who melt at the sight of anything younger than 10, so Billy was what I dreaded most about the film. Surprisingly, he isn’t the bratty piece of festering bowel movement I expected him to be, and he had some surprisingly funny moments.
“What’s your stripper name?” he innocently asks an employee in an adult toy store. “I’ll just call you Cinnamon,” he adds, thoughtfully.
I went into Bad Grandpa in a bad mood, expecting a shallow attempt at shock humor. I left with a smile. I got exactly what I expected but executed much better than I could have ever imagined — it’s a consistently funny, occasionally hilarious guilty pleasure.
For every moment in the film Knoxville simply makes half-assed lewd comments at women, there’s a moment of pure, enjoyable insanity, such as when he plows through a mascot penguin statue with his car, blames his senility, and then almost gets beaten up by the owner after refusing to fix it. After watching Bad Grandpa, one thing is for sure: Knoxville certainly has a pair of cojones, and he certainly enjoys dangling them out of his tighty-whities.
