Directed By Bill Burr

Starring – Bill Burr, Bobby Cannavale, Bokeem Woodbine

The Plot – Jack Kelly (Burr), Connor Brody (Cannavale) and Mike Richards (Woodbine) are best friends, business partners and old dads. After agreeing to sell their throwback sports apparel company, they’re excited to punch their tickets to the lives they’ve always dreamed of. But when the company is made over by an eccentric new millennial CEO (Miles Robbins), Jack’s anger boils over, creating a series of crises at work, home and his son’s ultra-progressive preschool.

Rated R for pervasive language, sexual material, nudity, and brief drug use

Old Dads | A Netflix Film From Director Bill Burr | Official Trailer | Netflix – YouTube

POSITIVES

Very few things effectively work about this heavily flawed raunchy comedy, but what little does materializes as a result of the impeccable chemistry between the film’s trio of leads, which feels ripe with the kind of lived-in believability that transfers seamlessly to their various interactions. Burr pulls triple duty here, as the film’s writer, director and central protagonist, and while the material does feel like an extension of Burr’s own unapologetic stage show, he exudes a confidence in the rendering that his hardcore fandom will love and appreciate undoubtedly, with caustic wit and dry retorts to pay dividends towards his many off-beat reactions. Besides Bill, Bokeem Woodbine and Bobby Cannavale are equally charming and resilient with the environmental elements working so forcefully against them. Cannavale in particular is easily the best part of the movie, with three-dimensional charisma and emotional range that take him places that very few typecast roles previously have taken him, and when combined with Woodbine’s blunt audaciousness, rounds out a group of boisterously bizarre personalities who only fit into the confines of this particular group.

NEGATIVES

Comedy is subjective to everyone that a film comes across, but for me, between the Netflix rendering and crudeness of the material, I was given traumatically haunting flashbacks to last year’s “Me Time”, a flavorless, humorless engagement that landed on my five worst films of the year list. “Old Dads” has a legitimate chance at the same territory, with stage show humor in set-ups and punchlines that don’t necessarily translate well to the structure of cinema, based on abrasive forcefulness, alone. Because so many of the film’s various predicaments and conflicts feel so unnatural and even parodied for Burr’s own conservative ideals for how he views various topics like transgendered people, cancel culture and seething hatred for anyone or anything born after 1987, the comedy doesn’t emulate anything remotely believable or appealing to anyone born on this planet, and when combined with R-rated influence so heavy-handed with influence, leads to very few laughs for material that feels redundant by the film’s ten minute mark. In addition to this, Burr’s first delve behind the camera isn’t exactly a convincing one of his many talents as a visual or thematic storyteller, with a plain Jane execution that continuously made this feel like an extensive 100 minute TV pilot. The set-up on its own isn’t remotely compelling on its own merits, but when the script abandons it at the film’s halfway point, it goes searching for another direction to exploit, and at that point the humor goes almost entirely out of the window, in favor of a melodramatic second half that doesn’t earn a single shred of its hearty moments. Burr’s inexperience in the director’s chair is ultimately to blame for this, because his direction never lets any of these candid moments breathe with long-lasting impact, so like a TV show, we’re just kind of treated to these temporary conflicts that not only materialize out of nowhere, but also feel plucked directly from a movie that feels far from the confines of its own established route. This jarring instability and tonal imbalance leads towards a difficulty to remain invested, but beyond that an overwhelming boredom factor that made the second half such a chore to continuously sift through, especially in abandoning the humor that at least feels most familiar with Burr’s own personality, even if it lacks accuracy or consistency. The film’s closing moments echo this sentiment, especially in giving brief, underwhelming finality to the film’s many stacking subplots that its focus chose not to pursue, in turn building no semblance of momentum to hook the audience into even accidentally investing in. Then there’s the editing and various other sort of mishaps that outline a completely sloppy undertaking, primarily in one character’s pregnancy, which spawns as a result of a preganancy test in one scene, before her becoming bloated with six months of growth in her stomach, in the next. I even went back and rewatched this section of the film, in order to see if I maybe missed on-screen text conveying months of passage between two scenes, but had nothing as evidence, so instead it’s just another example of how no conflict or interaction within the film is even remotely fleshed out with even an ounce of believability or nuance.

OVERALL
“Old Dads” does feature a trio of credible performances from Burr, Woodbine and Cannavale committing themselves to the Herculean task of making this an enjoyable occasion but are repeatedly undercut by a disorienting script and mundane direction that diminish their efforts. The jokes full of crude observations and exaggerated outbursts feel like a curmudgeon’s guide to the universe, in which one out-of-touch Gen exer gripes about how great things used to be, and in the case of contemporary comedies like these, it’s a sentiment that the audience can relate towards wholeheartedly.

My Grade: 3/10 or F+