Written by Pete Timmermann Thursday, 24 October 2013 19:24
The film is sort of a letdown after how reliably funny the three proper Jackass films were.
In my review of 2010’s Jackass 3D, I wrote about how much I love the Jackass films but that that one would presumably be their last, given that the troupe is getting older, frailer, and straighter (in terms of drug use; they’re just as homoerotic as ever) with each installment. As such, it seems like a great move to take the brand into Borat territory with Bad Grandpa, which is a feature-length riff on Johnny Knoxville’s faux-86-year-old Irving Zisman character. Instead of being one long montage of stunts as the previous Jackass movies were, there is something like a binding narrative to Bad Grandpa, and instead of the mean tricks being leveled at other members of the Jackass team, most of the victims here are regular, unknowing people who “Irving” runs into in his road trip from Nebraska to North Carolina.
I always preferred the three Jackass movies to Borat or Brüno; while I like some of the social commentary contained in the Sacha Baron Cohen films, the Jackass movies seem more honest and pure — it’s much more fair to be mean to members of the filmmaking group than it is random passersby, and also Borat and Brüno generally seem meaner-spirited and suspect in their total reality (it’s clear that some scenes are unstaged, but every now and then you got the impression from those films that more people were in on the joke than the filmmakers were letting on). So while doing Bad Grandpa in the Borat style is probably the wisest move Knoxville, director Jeff Tremaine, and the rest of the Jackass troupe could have done, the film is sort of a letdown after how reliably funny the three proper Jackass films were.
To be fair, Bad Grandpa is reliably funny. One of the biggest problems is that very nearly all of the film’s funniest scenes are in the trailer, though, so this winds up being one of those movies that you may as well save the $10 on and just watch the trailer online instead. (Go for the red band one). In between those great scenes we see in the trailer is mostly just scripted interstitial stuff between Zisman and his 8-year-old grandson Billy, none of which is very funny. That said, Billy is played by Jackson Nicoll, with whom Knoxville acted in in last year’s laughably bad Fun Size and who is great in his stunts here and gives me hope for the Jackass of the future.
Though there are things to recommend it, Bad Grandpa does fall into the problems I complained about re: Borat and Brüno. For one, Bad Grandpa often seems to target not only unsuspecting but also undeserving victims; random people on the street aside, at one point Zisman and Billy create a scene at a rendezvous for the Guardians of Children, which is a biker club that fights child abuse, or at a funeral, or at a wedding — at the funeral and wedding I imagine a good chunk of the people were in on the joke from the outset, which makes it better in theory, but also less fun to watch, and in the process throws the whole credibility of the film into question. Meanwhile, the credibility issue is also strained by the fact that at one point Zisman and Billy are supposedly in St. Louis, but they clearly aren’t for most of that sequence—aside from streets and landmarks being unrecognizable, mere seconds into the St. Louis sequence they’re outside a gas station that has an ad for the Sacramento Bee in their window (the Sac Bee being Sacramento’s daily newspaper, if you didn’t figure that one out on your own) — do you know of any gas stations around here that advertise in their window that they sell the Sacramento Bee? Because I sure don’t.
It’s hard not to call diminishing returns on Bad Grandpa, because that’s what it is — a worse film than Borat, Brüno, or any of the Jackass films that came prior. Even so, it is at least reasonably funny, and I’m happy that they’re still finding work for the Jackass guys; I like them all a lot and would like to see their careers extended. Now, if they can find some way to build a feature around Steve-O, I’ll really be happy. | Pete Timmermann