THE WAR WITH GRANDPA. Pure Family Entertainment

In hindsight, we have probably all grown accustomed to the fact that Robert De Niro’s name appears ever more frequently on posters for productions whose quality raises certain doubts. The unfortunate culmination of this trend was the actor’s bizarre turn in Dirty Grandpa. The War with Grandpa in many ways feels like a family-friendly reflection of that 2016 comedy. And although it fares better by comparison, it still leaves a great deal to be desired.

Of course, The War with Grandpa, directed by Tim Hill, is pure family entertainment. Unlike Dan Mazer’s film, there are no constant sexual innuendos here, and jokes revolving around nudity appear only twice—handled cautiously, yet still painfully unfunny. Robert De Niro plays Ed, an elderly man who, following the death of his wife and struggling to adapt to a rapidly changing world (he cannot manage shopping at a self-checkout), moves into the home of his daughter, played by Uma Thurman.

The grandfather’s sudden arrival means that his grandson Peter (Oakes Fegley) is unceremoniously banished to the attic. His beloved bedroom falls into Ed’s hands. The boy decides to retaliate and declares the titular war. The prize is Peter’s former room; the weapons, naturally, are pranks, traps, and jokes of varying degrees of innocence.

From that point on, the film becomes a string of self-contained scenes revolving around the duel between grandfather and grandson. One outwits the other, only for the favor to be returned minutes later. The filmmakers, however, show little creativity despite the ample opportunities: the tricks are familiar routines involving drills, hammers, glue, toothpaste, and sealant disguised as shaving foam.

Compared to these pranks, the traps from Home Alone feel like a Mount Everest of ingenuity. It is a shame the filmmakers did not let their imaginations run at least a little wild; the film would have benefited greatly.

The best scenes in The War with Grandpa undoubtedly feature De Niro alongside Christopher Walken. It is hard to believe this was only their second shared project (not counting Mistress, a largely forgotten Hollywood satire in which Walken had a cameo) since The Deer Hunter more than forty years ago. It took a middling family comedy to reunite two outstanding American actors in the same frame. They appear entirely at ease in their undemanding roles, generating a natural, unforced chemistry that makes simply watching them a pleasure.

Even if “action” here means a dodgeball match (arguably the film’s best, though utterly predictable, sequence), tossing a school bully into a trash can, or wrecking a kitschy Christmas-themed birthday party.

Like most family films, The War with Grandpa carries a moral, boiling down to the (perfectly valid) notion that peace is always preferable to war—whose victims are, above all, innocent bystanders. Ed and Peter’s brutal pranks rebound on the entire family, especially the boy’s parents, who unknowingly stumble into one trap after another. The pacifist message reaches its peak during Peter’s younger sister’s birthday party, which ends in construction-level destruction, a completely burned Christmas tree, and Walken soaring through the air like in a new installment of Jackass. All because the characters, despite an earlier declaration of peace, could not resist their spiteful rivalry.

It seems that De Niro may continue appearing in films with “grandpa” in the title for the rest of his career. That appears to be the natural order of things. He gets to fool around with friends from forty years ago, play with his past screen persona, and, last but not least, earn some extra money. Fortunately, someone like Martin Scorsese still remains in his artistic life, occasionally drawing him back into more ambitious projects.