Dirty Grandpa.

Ah, it's been a while since I busted out that old zero-star rating. 
Disgusting, crude, embarrassing, badly made and at least 105 minutes too long (the film is 102 minutes long), Dirty Grandpa's greatest sin isn't what it does with a living legend like Robert De Niro - no one forced him to sign up for it, after all - but that every single attempt at humour misses by a mile. Mind you, there are actually way less attempts at humor than you might think for a comedy as it seems more than happy to replace actual gags with skin-crawling ickiness. And no, seeing De Niro masturbating and an extended "gag" of apparent paedophilia cannot possibly count as actual jokes: not even of the shit-stained toilet variety.

Pardon my vulgarity, but really, if you've seen the film, it's the only way to describe just how unrepentantly, wrong-headedly revoltingly unfunny it all is.

I do generally think that comedy is the one genre that can generally really get away with being offensive and wildly un-PC but the offensiveness has to serve the comedy and it should, if at all possible, actually serve a point. Dirty Grandpa is profane, ugly and nasty in a way that is both utterly unfunny and utterly without purpose but is made even worse when it takes the inevitable turn towards grossly unearned sentimentality and, heaven help us, moralizing about how one should always follow one's own path in life. I'm sorry, but fuck right off.    

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