Jeff Tremaine

Occupation

Filmmaker

Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa Review

By Rich Cline

Good

The Jackass crew takes an oddly gentle approach here, abandoning their more riotous stunt-based movies for a series of undercover pranks, like Borat or Bruno without the social commentary. It's sometimes very funny, although more gags fall flat than hit the mark. But fans will enjoy the interaction between Knoxville and his fearless 8-year-old cohort Nicoll.

Knoxville is in character throughout the film as Irving, an 86-year-old whose wife has just died. At the funeral, his wayward daughter (Cates) turns up to drop off her son Billy (Nicoll) before she goes to prison. So Irving's job is to drive from Nebraska to North Carolina to deliver Billy to his loser dad. On the ensuing road trip the relentlessly mischievous Irving takes advantage of his newly single status to chat up every woman he meets, often with Billy's sharp-witted help. They also get up to all kinds of trouble, robbing a convenience shop, crashing a wedding, upstaging male strippers in a bar and even entering a "little miss" beauty pageant to earn some extra cash.

Whether you find this funny or not depends on your enjoyment of jokes that centre on genitalia, with a particular emphasis on farting. Essentially, the film is a series of elaborately staged set-pieces in which Irving and Billy do outrageous things to get a Candid Camera-style reaction from the general public. And it's often quite funny that people just shrug off things like drinking beer with an 8-year-old or carrying his dead wife's body in the boot of his car. The best sequence involves a gang of burly bikers who dedicate themselves to protecting abused children; watching them close ranks around Billy is actually rather sweet.

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Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa - Teaser Trailer

The 'Jackass' crew are wreaking havoc on the unwary streets of America again, this time with one of them playing a crude, clumsy and very wayward grandfather, Irving Zisman, who is taking his young grandson Billy on a long road trip across the States to where his father will take of him. On the way, the kid is doing the babysitting as the 'old man' gets out of control robbing convenience stores, interrupting weddings and causing catastrophes at funerals and kid beauty pageants (the latter at which Billy causes quite a stir with an awkward pole dancing routine). Hidden cameras capture the real, mostly angry and sometimes traumatised reactions of the general public who have probably never prepared themselves to meet such a bad grandpa before.

'Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa' is the latest instalment of the American stunt group's franchise which sees stuntman Johnny Knoxville embarrass, horrify and upset unsuspecting onlookers across America with more shockingly daring pranks than ever before. Doubtlessly one of the funniest flicks of the year, it has been directed by Jeff Tremaine ('Jackass: The Movie', 'Wildboyz') who co-wrote it with Preston Lacy ('TV: The Movie', 'Jackass 3D') and it is set to hit theatres on October 25th 2013.

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