Mark Reviews Movies: THE WAR WITH GRANDPA

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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 8, 2020

Director Tim Hill has definitely made The War with Grandpa with children in mind. The story, based on the book by Robert Kimmel Smith, revolves around the primary concerns of kids: video games, sports, parties, hanging out with friends online and occasionally in person, exotic pets, quarrels with siblings, and assaults by bullies. At its center, though, is a battle over a kid's most prized possession: a room to call his or her own.

The simplicity of wants within Tom J. Astle and Matt Ember's screenplay is surprisingly admirable. This feels like a story to which kids easily could relate. You have your room, offering a cozy, private escape from the world of ever-watchful parents, judgmental siblings, and whatever drama might be unfolding at school. Then, without warning, that sanctuary is taken away from you. What is a sixth grader to do?

That's the central conflict of this movie. The kid wants his bedroom, but his widower grandfather suffers an injury and needs to live with the family. The boy's room is the only viable living space for the old man, and sometimes, sacrifices need to be made for the good of loved ones.

Okay, to be fair, the movie doesn't exactly start this innocently. Ed (Robert De Niro), the grandfather, is injured after failing to pay at a self-checkout station at a grocery store and, mostly, after falling down while attacking the store employee who politely tries to stop him (The poor guy also ends up being beaten and pelted by food thrown by senior citizens who assume the worst of him). It's a bit cruel.

To also be fair, though, the movie doesn't so much have a mean streak as it possesses a considerable affection for pranks, pratfalls, some bodily harm, and destruction. These are also some of the favorite activities of and jokes for children, but when they become the entire focus of a movie, it becomes more dull than amusing.

There is a thematic point to all of this, and if one can actually believe it, that message is a strong, if very clumsily and oddly argued, case against war. We're not just talking the battle between 11-year-old Peter (Oakes Fegley) and grandpa, though. The filmmakers have set out to make a grand statement about international conflict. The end credits even showcase a music video set to an original pop song about the futility and devastation of war (along with some particularly lazy outtakes).

To say the movie's reach extends beyond its grasp is a monumental understatement. A smarter, quainter approach that treats its characters with some dignity and its situation with a bit more sincerity might have been capable of pulling off this tonal shift. This movie, though, is played entirely for laughs, often at the expense of its characters and definitely by testing their threshold for humiliation and pain.

The war between grandson and grandfather begins after Peter has to move into the attic at the request—well, command—of his parents Sally (Uma Thurman), Ed's daughter, and Arthur (Rob Riggle). Peter declares war, demanding the return of his bedroom. Ed dismisses it at first, but the kid's pranks quickly escalate. Grandpa's buddies Jerry (Christopher Walken) and Danny (Cheech Marin) convince him that retaliation is the only option.

Is there anything more to explain? Perhaps, the only things remaining are whether or not the assorted pranks are innocent or malicious and, more importantly, whether or not they're actually funny. Some of them are fine—loud music blasting in the middle of the night, the destruction of a castle in a video game, putting a seemingly harmless snake into someone's bed. Some of them are borderline—changing the speed on a record player so that the vinyl disc shoots out across the room, gluing a jar of marbles to a cabinet so that the glass breaks with the effort of trying to lift it, removing key hardware from assorted furniture.

Some of them are, well, kind of violent and dangerous, especially during a setpiece birthday party, which ends up with someone receiving an electric shock, someone else launching into the air, a fire, and a tree ripping off part of the house. On the whole, given the movie's embrace of slapstick physics, they're more or less harmless.

As for humor, results undoubtedly will vary. A dodgeball game played on trampolines—with Ed, his friends, and his eventual love interest Diane (Jane Seymour) on one side and Peter and his eclectic collection of pals (the dumb kid, the bragging kid, and a girl with some basic common sense) on the other—has some kinetic energy. Much of it—such as Ed's tendency to end up accidentally pants-less in front of his son-in-law, a running gag involving Sally unintentionally assaulting the same cop, a morbid scene in which Ed has to dig through the suit of a dead man to retrieve his cellphone—feels desperate.

There's at least some heart to counterbalance the mayhem, as Peter and Ed inevitably bond over their pranking ways. The War with Grandpa means well (too much so in its final message), but good intentions can't make up for its obvious and many shortcomings.

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