The War with Grandpa

Directed by Tim Hill, The War with Grandpa follows Robert De Niro’s Ed as he reluctantly agrees to move into his daughter’s (Uma Thurman’s Sally) house and winds up taking his grandson’s (Oakes Fegley) room – with the narrative detailing the battle that ensues between the two characters over possession of said room. It’s a silly premise that’s employed to mostly lackluster effect by Hill, although, to be fair, The War with Grandpa is periodically far more watchable than one might’ve anticipated – as the movie boasts relatively decent work from its roster of performers and a small handful of genuinely compelling sequences. (There’s little doubt, in terms of the latter, that the picture is at its best when focused on the low-key exploits of its characters, with this especially true of Ed’s friendship with a pair of fellow retirees, Christopher Walken’s Jerry and Cheech Marin’s Danny.) The picture’s inevitable descent into tedium, then, is due almost entirely to its growing emphasis on juvenile, unreasonably broad bits of comedy, as such moments are, for the most part, entirely unfunny and suffer from a pointedly bottom-of-the-barrel feel (eg Ed fondles a dead body to silence his noisy phone, Sally is faced with a snake during her commute, etc, etc). The eye-rollingly sentimental closing stretch is subsequently unable to pack the heartwarming punch Hill has obviously intended, to put it mildly, which cements The War with Grandpa‘s place as a lowest-common-denominator that squanders the efforts of a surprisingly talented cast.

*1/2 out of ****