Tough guy Robert De Niro shows his silly side in cross-generational comedy ‘The War with Grandpa’
The War with Grandpa
Starring Robert De Niro, Uma Thurman, Rob Riggle and Oakes Fegley
Directed by Tim Hill
PG
In theaters Oct. 9, 2020
Growing old is no joke, but it’s good for some laughs in this comedy about a 10-year-old boy forced to give up his bedroom when his grandfather moves in.
Based on an award-winning 1984 children’s book by Robert Kimmel Smith, The War with Grandpa begins when elderly widower Ed (Robert De Niro) causes a stir at a supermarket self-checkout, leading to an incident that results in his injury. That causes his adult daughter, Sally (Uma Thurman), to finally insist that he’s no longer capable of living alone.
Finding at spot for dear old dad at her home means her son, Peter (Oakes Fegley, who starred as Pete in Disney’s 2016 remake of Pete’s Dragon), gets booted from his bedroom and into the sparsely furnished attic.
Peter’s none too happy about the forced relocation, complaining both at home and at school, where his clique of buddies spurs on his beef. “The attic,” Pete huffs. “Where you put stuff and forget it.”
“I’d demand my room back,” counsels one of his friends. “Or it’s war.”
And war it is, as Peter launches a volley of outrageous pranks devised to get his grandpa to move out of his space—and his grandfather counterattacks with his own bag of devious dirty tricks.
Peter blasts Grandpa awake with a booming speaker on a remote-controlled car, changes out his shaving cream with cement-like self-adhering foam and glues down his keepsakes; Grandpa removes all the screws from Peter’s furniture, secretly rewrites his homework assignments and sabotages his favorite computer game.
The comedic conflict escalates to a decisive dodgeball game between Peter’s perky schoolmates and gramp’s spry geriatric gang, Jerry (Christopher Walken), Danny (Cheech Marin) and Diane (Jane Seymour).
Director Tim Hill wrote for TV’s Spongebob Squarepants and directed the 2020 movie The Spongebob Movie: Sponge on the Run, plus the family films Max Keeble’s Big Move, Muppets from Space, Alvin and The Chipmunks and Hop. So knows what’s funny and where to find it, in measures both big and small, whether it’s Thurman doing a spit take with a cup of coffee all over her car windshield, or De Niro fumbling and mumbling as Ed tries to figure out a new high-tech task, like how to open a digital version of his morning newspaper or use a new iPhone to get a ride on Lyft.
But oh, does this movie have to repeatedly go so low—literally—for yuks? It repeatedly body-slams two Oscar winners (De Niro and Walken) and one nominee (Thurman) hard on the ground as visual punchlines—ouch! And maybe it’s OK to engineer a guffaw out of someone seeing Grandpa, ahem, sans trousers. But twice? C’mon—that’s not a running joke, it’s comedic elder abuse.
De Niro, who won his Oscar for The Godfather: Part II, is best known for playing gangsters and goombahs in movies like Casino, Cape Fear and last year’s The Irishman. He also has a sly, dry knack for the refreshing fizz of comedy, as demonstrated in Midnight Run, Meet the Parents and Analyze This. But even then, his movie-mobster reputation precedes him. When a black limo pulls up in front of Peter’s middle school, the rear window rolls down and Grandpa tells grandson to “get in the car,” it’s a bit worrisome, at least for a moment. Are they headed to pick up Joe Pesci?
Rob Riggle gets in some good chuckle-worthy moments as Ed’s son-in-law, and former Disney star Laura Marano (she was Ally on Austin & Ally, and also one of the original panelists on Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?) plays Peter’s teenage sister, Mia. Young Poppy Gagnon is a petite scene-stealer as Jennifer, Peter’s Christmas-obsessed little sis.
Younger viewers won’t get the jokes, but eagle-eyed parents may smile with the movie’s knowing nods to its cast’s previous projects and its impressive movie DNA—a line of dialogue from Meet the Parents, a takeoff of an iconic scene from The Godfather, an interaction between De Niro and Walken that recalls their collaboration in The Deer Hunter, the 1978 movie for which Walken received his Oscar. And when Thurman’s character tells daughter Mia that “I was your age once,” we remember that yes, she was—and that she once played a character also named Mia, in Pulp Fiction. Wink, wink.
For all that subtlety, some of the gags are a bit over the top, the humor gets a tad slap-sticky, and the “battle” in a war like this one would not only leave bumps and bruises in real life, it would surely put most grandpas in in a body cast, if not a casket.
But hey, this fighting is all for fun. And if this mega-broad, generation-spanning movie comedy sometimes feels like watching a feature-length, superstar edition of America’s Funniest Home Videos, at least its cast of all-stars seems game to throw themselves—sometimes literally—into a setups that have something for just about for everyone.
Nobody’s going to add any Oscar gold to their mantle with The War with Grandpa. But there’s a genuine sweetness inside all the rampant silliness, a message about family and togetherness and the importance of building something that lasts, like a home, with a group of people who love you—instead of tearing things down, blowing them up or smashing them to pieces in a crazy war over a bedroom, or anything else.
The Media Tourist 