The War with Grandpa: Shaky Kids-Versus-Codgers Comedy Too Blunt to Punt

By Liam Lacey

Rating: C

The first family movie in what promises to be a uniquely weird holiday season, The War with Grandpa stars Robert De Niro in another of those late-career comic tough-guy parts. There’s nothing wrong with an actor broadening his brand, and a great actor doing mediocre work is more interesting than a mediocre actor at his best.

And because De Niro is now more-or-less family, we can watch fondly as he grimaces and squints in a parody of all his roles as a killer while at the same time, feeling a little embarrassed by his choice of material.

De Niro’s latest geezer wheezer is based on a bestselling 1984 kids’ novel of the same title by Robert Kimmel Smith, a moralistic story about the dangers of war and escalation during the last decade of the Cold War. There’s nothing so serious going on here. Busy kids’ movie director Tim Hill (Muppets from Space, The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie, Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties) presents a series of progressively more busy slapstick set-pieces, reworking the macho family contest of movies like Meet the Fockers and Daddy’s Home.

De Niro plays Ed, a retired house builder, war vet, and widower. After an unfortunate incident with a self-checkout machine at the local supermarket, he is forced to move in with his bossy adult daughter, Sally (Uma Thurman) and her milquetoast husband Arthur (Rob Riggle). Their three kids include the boy-crazy indifferent teen daughter Mia (Laura Marano) and pre-schooler Jennifer (Poppy Gagnon), who is delighted with a new potential playmate.

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But sixth-grader Peter (Oakes Fegley of Pete’s Dragon), despite his angelic looks, has the kind of dark side attentive guidance counsellors keep files on. After he has been displaced from his bedroom into the attic, Peter decides to wage a war on his grandfather to get his room back.

Grandpa Ed, who catches on fast, gets the kid to sign a “rules of engagement,” which means there will be “no collateral damage” to other members of the family, and neither side can tell the parents what’s going on.

Each adversary brings in his allies: Peter has his sixth-grade friends, a nerdy group who are terrorized by the school bullies. Grandpa Ed has bachelor friends Jerry (Christopher Walken) and Danny (Cheech Marin) and Diane (Jane Seymour), a friendly cashier who he enlists to his cause. What follows is essentially a series of set-ups and knockdowns.

Furniture is unscrewed, coffee is tainted, computer games are hacked. There’s an extended dodgeball tournament between agile adolescents and creaky but mean old-timers, and a Christmas carnival scene, full of exploding lights and a flattened bouncy castle.

Other scenes, rather than showing the escalation, appear to have been transported from another cut of the film. At one point and with no clear motivation, Ed, Jerry, and Danny dress up like hoodlums, head to the school and toss a bullying sixth-grader into a garbage dumpster. That scene conveys the important message to kids that bullying is wrong, especially if you’re small and outnumbered.

While The War with Grandpa avoids outright R-rated gross-outs, the film does have a peculiar running gag where the emasculated husband, Arthur, sees Ed naked and is, for reasons left to our imaginations, horrified. Thurman as Ed’s daughter and an over-controlling wife and mother has a notably unsympathetic role. (Given that the film pilfers De Niro’s onscreen history, I couldn’t help but be awkwardly aware that the last time she was onscreen with De Niro, back in 1992, they were having frantic sex in Mad Dog and Glory).

In theory, it should be possible to have a comedy about a competition between an elderly man and a child to injure and humiliate each other, but it would need to be substantially sharper than The War with Grandpa to make the case.

The War with Grandpa. Directed by Tim Hill. Written by Tom J. Astle and Matt Embe. Starring Robert De Niro, Uma Thurman, Rob Riggle, Oakes Fegley, Cheech Marin, Christopher Walken and Jane Seymour. Opens October 9 at Cineplex Cinemas.