Bad Grandpa

In this gleeful gross-out comedy, actor/comedian Johnny Knoxville hams it up, buried under layers of latex as Irving Zisman, the proverbial dirty old man. Originally introduced during the final season of MTV's Jackass, crotchety 86-year-old Irving now has a full-fledged family, including a crack-addicted daughter (Georgina Cates), who's headed for prison—leaving Grandpa to deliver cherubic, 8-year-old Billy (Jackson Nicoll) to the boy's derelict father (Greg Harris) in North Carolina. Adopting the improvisational Borat/Bruno faux-documentary style of Sacha Baron Cohen, the self-absorbed, foul-mouthed, totally irresponsible Irving pulls hidden-camera pranks that wreak havoc on unsuspecting real people's lives, such as having unwitting furniture movers help him load the swaddled corpse of his late wife into the trunk of his decrepit Lincoln—and that's just the beginning. At one point, lecherous Irving enters a strip club only to discover that the clientele are black women and that the performers are hunky men. Undeterred, he doffs his pants and gyrates so enthusiastically that his pendulous prosthetic scrotum falls out of his underwear. But where Baron Cohen goes for biting satire, Knoxville, writer Spike Jonze, and director Jeff Tremaine instead opt for geriatric sweetness as they follow a raunchy, superficially-scripted storyline that includes a visit to a bingo parlor, beer-puking, Irving's penis caught in a vending machine, and even an obnoxious Little Miss Sunshine-inspired child beauty-pageant performance in which deadpan Billy performs in drag to Warrant's “Cherry Pie” while another contestant makes Miley Cyrus's tongue-twisting and twerking look mild (outtakes during the end credits reveal why unwitting bystanders didn't immediately report child neglect/abuse). Optional. [Note: Blu-ray/DVD Combo extras include both the unrated and theatrical versions of the film, behind-the-scenes featurettes (35 min.), “Alternate Marks” reactions (20 min.), deleted scenes (6 min.), and bonus digital and UltraViolet copies of the film. Bottom line: a solid extras package for an uneven comedy.] (S. Granger)