Dirty Grandpa

In his seventy-third year, Robert De Niro is clearly relishing the fact that he’s got nothing left to prove. Why else put himself through shameless trash like this? He plays Dick, a just-widowed, super-horny pensioner with Special Forces training who embarks on an odd-couple Florida road-trip with his uptight lawyer grandson Jason (Zac Efron). Jason just wants to drive the old boy safely to his holiday home, but grandpa’s out to – and I’m quoting here – ‘fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck’.

You know that subtlety is not on the film’s agenda when ‘Dirty Grandpa’ opens with the sight of His Venerable Bobness spanking the monkey to a porno. And however much he goes hell for leather with the filthy dialogue, it’s hard not to feel that De Niro is – surely? – better than this. He’s game, though; so to is Efron, whose romantic subplot is a snore. There are laughs, but they’re tinged with the sadness of watching a beloved elderly relative making a bloody old fool of himself.