When Amy Poehler was on The
Ellen DeGeneres Show earlier this week, she talked about her disdain for
pranks. Ellen showed her several YouTube videos of people going to elaborate
lengths scaring friends and family. After each one, the camera would cut back
to Poehler, brow furrowed, mouth drawn into an exaggerated frown. “How about
that one?” Ellen would ask. “Nope,” Poehler would grunt. I’m glad she did that,
not just because it was a funny bit, but also because it helped me know what my face probably looked like for most of Bad
Grandpa. It’s a loosely plotted movie that is wall-to-wall hidden-camera
pranks, most of them bizarre, upsetting, or filthy behavior that happens in the
vicinity of strangers. As I watched, I felt my face scrunch up for so long I
was nearly worried it would stay that way. As the antics played out across the
screen, I spent my time debating logistics – how did they film this? – and
worrying about the well-being of the innocent bystanders.
These are no Candid
Camera good-natured goofs. The movie comes from star Johnny Knoxville and
director Jeff Tremaine, the pranksters behind the Jackass show and movies in which a team of like-minded buddies
would egg each other on into masochistic pranks involving shock gross out
squirminess and threats of bodily harm, all for our ostensible amusement. Here,
the humor comes from staging dangerous and crude stunts in front of the general
public. It’s no longer masochism; it’s mean-spirited. Take, for instance, an
early scene in which Knoxville, who spends the entire movie in convincing
old-age makeup playing the Bad Grandpa of the title, hosts an estate sale. He
sits down on an adjustable bed and goads a middle-aged woman, who thinks she’s
just a customer at an average sale, into testing the bed’s buttons. It predictably
goes haywire, snapping upright from both ends and trapping Knoxville inside.
The camera lingers on the trembling woman in glee as Knoxville extricates himself.
Relishing the poor woman’s fright isn’t funny. It’s just cruel.
The plot, such as it is, involves the Bad Grandpa on a road
trip to take his eight-year-old grandson (Jackson Nicoll) to the boy’s dad.
It’s mainly an excuse to stage moments like shoplifting from a convenience
store, which culminates in the manager yelling at them in the parking lot,
saying quite rightly that the boy should be taken away from him. Another gag
involves a funeral with invited strangers, thinking they’re helping a poor old
man’s grief, witnessing the body (fake, of course, but awfully real looking)
falling out of the casket, after which Knoxville proceeds to dance with it
while angrily insisting the congregation sing a hymn. Other gags include a
malfunctioning mechanical contraption launching the Bad Grandpa through a plate
glass window, the old man pushed in a shopping cart up to a drive-thru window,
a bout of explosive diarrhea that splatters a diner wall, and a crashed beauty
pageant featuring a risqué drag performance by the little boy. Bystanders are
often more perplexed and weirded out than anything else, especially when, say, Knoxville
takes his old man character into a male strip club and tries to muscle his way
on stage.
Compare the slack, mean pranks here to Sacha Baron Cohen’s not unproblematic overrated Borat and underrated Bruno. There Cohen tends to go after
satirical targets with his hidden-camera improv stunts. He’s hilarious and
cringe-worthy at once, precisely because it’s calibrated to tweak racist,
xenophobic, and homophobic undercurrents, blowing past the limits of propriety
to make a point. When he gets a group of people to sing his fake folk song “Throw
the Jew Down the Well,” it’s as upsetting and unnerving as it is hilarious for
the bias he unearths. When he throws a cage match in the deep south and
suddenly begins making out with his opponent mid-bout, the howls of protest
from the drunken crowd give the whole thing an edge of danger and upheaval for
the ultimate benefit of all involved, if for nothing else than the societal
observation it provokes. When Bad Grandpa goes to a bingo game, drinks the ink
out of his markers, pours lime juice down his pants, and aggressively flirts
with all the ladies around him, it’s ultimately pointless. I felt bad for those
women. They’re the butt of the joke in a scenario that exists only to have us
laugh at their discomfort.
I make Bad Grandpa sound
like an unendurable experience. I’ve no doubt that for many it would be. For me
it could have been and nearly was, but I must confess to laughing right out
loud maybe three times, even though all those best jokes are lifted from Little Miss Sunshine and Borat. And there’s some genuine
camaraderie between Knoxville and Nicoll that generates a few freestanding
moments of mild entertainment when the two characters simply scamper around
pulling pranks on each other. Maybe they work well together because they’re on
a similar level of juvenile dumbness, a mix of fearless energy and unchecked
mischievousness. It’s too bad the movie’s so sour it can’t even capitalize on
their chemistry for the sappy grandfather-grandson bonding conclusion it so
desperately tries to pull off. For me the biggest laugh comes not from any of
the elaborate dangerous or crude stunts the production pulls, but from a
comment a woman on the street directs towards the boy when confronted with the
pair: “I feel like I should take your picture and see if you’re on a milk
carton somewhere.” Otherwise the movie kept waving its pranks in my face
asking, “How about that one?” To which I could only reply, “Nope.”
