Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa (2013)

Here's the thing about Irving Zisman: five minutes of him is funny. Eighty-four minutes of him is a slog. Bad Grandpa had me checking the time somewhere around the halfway mark, which is not a feeling you want from a film built on the promise of chaotic, spontaneous comedy.

Johnny Knoxville under layers of prosthetics, playing a grouchy, perverted old man with no filter, is a genuinely impressive technical achievement. I'll get to that. But the character himself was always one of the more grating recurring bits in the Jackass universe, and stretching him out to feature length doesn't fix that problem. It amplifies it. What the film is asking you to do is spend an hour and a half with someone who, in concentrated doses, made for a decent sketch, but as a protagonist, becomes exhausting company pretty quickly.

The premise is paper-thin. Irving has to transport his grandson across the country following some kind of custody situation, with the aim of dumping the kid on his deadbeat father. That's essentially it. It's a road movie chassis bolted onto a hidden-camera prank format, and the join shows constantly. The bystanders being pranked have no idea they're in a film, which is technically staggering, but the scripted connective tissue between the stunts feels hollow because it has to be. It's there to give the crew time to set up the next gag, not to make you care about anyone on screen.

And that's before we even get to the emotional beats, which are where Bad Grandpa really lost me. Towards the end, the film suddenly decides it wants heart. It wants you to feel something genuine about the relationship between Irving and his grandson. But you've just spent the previous hour watching this man do deeply crude things to unsuspecting members of the public, and now you're being asked to get a bit misty? It feels manipulative rather than earned. It's like the film remembered it was supposed to be a movie and panicked.

Look, I've got a lot of affection for the Jackass lot. I think Jackass Forever is a genuinely joyful piece of work, and there's a reason that format has lasted as long as it has. The commitment, the camaraderie, the sheer willingness to suffer for a laugh. It's all there. And elements of that are present here too. The prank setups in Bad Grandpa are clever, some of them are really clever, and the editing required to make Knoxville's interactions with real people look seamless is no small feat. The crew clearly worked incredibly hard.

That makeup, by the way? It absolutely deserved its Oscar nomination. Knoxville disappears completely. You genuinely believe you're looking at an elderly man, and the fact that real people on the street bought it wholesale is proof of that. The craft is not in question here at all.

But craft and comedy aren't the same thing, and a film can be technically impressive while still being a rough watch. The humour here is relentlessly juvenile, leaning almost entirely on shock and transgression, which works in short bursts but grows numbing over a feature runtime. When the shock wears off, there's not much else to fall back on. The story certainly isn't going to save it.

There's a version of this concept that works. A tighter, sharper, maybe forty-five minute version, where the best pranks are strung together with the minimum of narrative scaffolding. That might have been genuinely funny. What we got instead is a film that mistakes length for ambition and shock for substance.

Two stars. The makeup artist earned their nomination. The rest of us earned a refund.

Rating: ★★  | Year: 2013  | Watched: 2025-10-16

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Related on Movies With Macca

More from Jeff Tremaine: Jackass: Gumball Rally 3000 Special (2002) · Jackass 3.5 (2011) · Jackass 2.5 (2007) · Jackass Forever (2022)
More with Johnny Knoxville: Skiptrace (2016) · The Dukes of Hazzard (2005) · The Ringer (2005) · Walking Tall (2004)
More from the 2010s: Wonder (2017) · Beautiful Boy (2018) · The Witch (2015) · What We Do in the Shadows (2014)
More comedy: The Eagle (1925) · The General (1926) · Americana (2023) · The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! (1988)