Critics reviews

De Niro embraces his role with such shameless, demonic glee that you wonder if maybe he himself has been waiting to cut loose for some time. And it’s a hilarious, snort-laugh-inducing movie, albeit the kind that makes you want to take a shower afterward.

The screenplay, by John M. Phillips, is the written equivalent of a toddler discovering curse words. Yet some riffs draw chuckles: Aubrey Plaza reaches some personal seventh heaven trading aggressive come-ons with Mr. De Niro; Jason Mantzoukas thrives as a flagrant drug dealer; and as Jason's strait-laced dad, Dermot Mulroney does a lot with a little deadpan delivery.

This second film by the Oscar-nominated Ali G and Borat scribe Dan Mazer is a work of surprisingly clear-eyed vision: it's a 90-minute leer in the general direction of Zac Efron, whose good-sporting, essentially decorative presence gently redirects the masculine thrust of the material. The satirical key is the contrast between Efron's hard-bodied blitheness and De Niro's spirit-is-willing/flesh-is-weak intensity as the titular Grandpa

The movie is so incredibly consistent in failing to land an honest laugh that about an hour into it, its not being funny becomes laughable: I began giggling with a kind of metaphysical embarrassment for everyone involved in the enterprise, and, eventually, for all of humanity itself. I see, scrawled in my notebook, the words "What is happening to our world?

The stunt-casting hijinks know no bounds, with Jason repeatedly alluding to his expertise in SEC compliance and LLC agreements (a bit that somehow gets funnier each time) while Dick performs a karaoke rendition of Ice Cube's "It Was a Good Day" to impress the college student he's hellbent on sleeping with (Plaza). Though many of these self-consciously crude jokes don't land, those that do are the life of the party. Late-era De Niro forever, y'all.

As Winston Churchill once said, "even fools are right sometimes," and the bulk of Dirty Grandpa is aggressively foolish. That includes the film's climax, which emptily restages the comparable scene from The Graduate, and provides an errant reference to ISIS for good, faux-provocative measure. Once true love wins and white-sanctioned tolerance rules, Dirty Grandpa finally emerges as something chillingly akin to the unholy love child of Judd Apatow and Donald Trump.