Do you think an old man getting into outrageous situations is funny? Do you think a little kid getting into outrageous situations is funny? Well, you’ll need to because that’s pretty much the only two jokes “Bad Grandpa” has got.
What Works: The idea of giving a Jackass hidden-camera-style movie a thin plot—-a young boy’s grandpa has to take him on a road trip to get him to his father—-could have had potential, but it quickly becomes apparent that Johnny Knoxville is no Sacha Baron Cohen. I will say that the Little Miss beauty pageant at the end, and a couple sight gags involving the grandpa’s testicles did make me laugh, there just wasn’t enough of that insanity to pad out the movie.
What Doesn’t Work: Sacha Baron Cohen’s Borat or Bruno really antagonize the people he’s punking, escalating the comedy to delirious heights. Knoxville’s grandpa is mostly tolerated by the people he’s saying crazy stuff to, and a few of them even laugh with them. Guerrilla-style hidden camera comedy really can’t thrive on a character who’s this likable, and the jokes are never quite as “outrageous” if the people are laughing with them. The film’s sustained joke (that old men are hilarious when doing crazy things) gets old long before the movie sputters to a close, and I could tell a lot of the audience was yawning through the laughs.
What I Would Have Done Differently: Knoxville may be too likable a guy to really excel at pushing the envelope through a prolonged punking like this. The Jackass films were as much about the guys who are in-on-the-joke trying to shock each other as they were about making bozos on the street do a double take. They had a spontaneous energy of “What gross stunt will I be watching in five minutes that is totally different from this one?” that, of course, a one-joke movie like this can’t hope to replicate.