This is the perfect storm of bad movie. Family film starring late-period Robert De Niro? Check. Uma Thurman overacting to the point you forget she’s actually talented? Check. Made by a filmmaker who proved this same year to be above this shit? Check. Written by the duo who gave us one of the worst scripts of all time? Check. Filmed years ago but only got pulled off the shelf during a dead cinematic season? Check. Reason for said shelving involving Weinstein? Check, check, and check. This film’s mere existence is baffling enough, but the actual content is on a whole other level.
Tim Hill may have delivered genuine entertainment with the latest SpongeBob movie, but that is an unfortunate anomaly in his directorial rap sheet. The first live-action Alvin and the Chipmunks movie, Garfield: A Tail Of Two Kitties, Grumpy Cat’s Worst Christmas Ever? That’s not a resume; that’s the selection on Stygian Netflix. And the same applies here, with a premise about a kid and his grandfather going to war over who gets the kid’s bedroom that’s trying to be a family-friendly commentary on war and how pointless it ultimately is. That’s cute and all, but when there are no zero straight-man foils to be seen to make the jokes work, and not even the leads seem capable of treating the premise with a straight face, it’s like being repeatedly elbowed in the ribs to punctuate how H I L A R I O U S this is.
Then again, if I had to work off a script this asinine, I wouldn’t be bothering either. Writers Tom J. Astle and Matt Ember may not be trying to meme every single conversation they write like with Home, but they sure do pull just about every other hack trick to fill out what is essentially a nothing story. We’ve got one-joke characters throughout, observations about how complicated technology is that make century eggs look freshly-laid by comparison, a running gag about the kid’s stepdad who keeps accidentally seeing the grandad’s genitals, and a school bully whose repeated line of dialogue would stand out if only every other scene set at that school wasn’t just played on repeat every single time.
And that’s just the minor gags; the actual story is just as bad. It didn’t need to be anything all that major, as it’s basically a prank war narrative, but it still manages to go well under-par in trying to depict it. Aside from the reasons behind the war being so thin that even the characters themselves can’t buy into it, a lot of lazy routes are taken for the pranks themselves (Grandad’s prized marble collection? Really, guys?), and for the sake of elongating an already-overlong story, both the kid and the grandad don’t even do the basics to check for each other’s traps. It is quite annoying to see people so adamant that this shit happen in the first place conveniently forgetting that it’s happening at the same time.
It’s because of all this that, even more so than anger or annoyance, most of what I feel is pity for the actors involved in this. De Niro, Thurman, Rob Riggle as Man-Who-Keeps-Seeing-De-Niro’s-Junk, Cheech Marin, Christopher bleeding Walken?! At the very least, he should have made this watchable, and admittedly, he is easily the most entertaining thing here as he’s in full awkward delivery mode here; this is Peak Walken. But even then, whether he’s playing Sky Zone dodgeball or responding to Cheech Marin saying “We’re walkin'?” like he forgot what was in the script, he can’t escape the fact that he’s still in The War With Grandpa.
And that’s the prevailing mood of this whole thing: It’s a movie that should have been kept on the shelf, as its release to the public only serves to shame everyone who worked on it, whether they deserve it or not. The kind of film someone would be paying ransom money to prevent from being released in the first place. I feel bad for having paid to see this thing myself, but I feel even worse for everyone incriminated by this retroactive blackmail material.
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