Review: Long-shelved 'The War With Grandpa' is all pratfalls and cartoonish humor, without a laugh to be had

At 77, Robert De Niro has built enough of a reputation as one of America’s greatest actors that he should be able to say “no” occasionally — and the misbegotten, slapdash kiddie comedy “The War With Grandpa” is one of those occasions.

De Niro plays Ed, a retired contractor who, after one too many incidents at his local grocery store, is convinced by his daughter, Sally (Uma Thurman), that he should come live with her family. Then she has to break the news to her family — architect husband Arthur (Rob Riggle), teen daughter Mia (former Disney Channel star Laura Marano), youngest daughter Jenny (Poppy Gagnon), and sixth-grade son Peter (Oakes Fegley, from “Wonderstruck” and “Pete’s Dragon”).

Peter takes Grandpa’s arrival particularly hard, because he’s required to give up his bedroom to the old man and move into the attic. Peter does what any reasonable 12-year-old would do: He writes a declaration of war, to drive Grandpa out of the house and reclaim the room.

Grandpa, sensing a chance for a teaching moment about the futility of war, accepts Peter’s challenge, setting up ground rules: No tattling, and no collateral damage on the rest of the family. With that, the pranks begin — small at first, but escalating in scope and property damage, though not in comedic content. Peter is egged on by his fellow sixth-graders, while Grandpa forms a posse of sprightly senior citizens: His old buddy Jerry (Christopher Walken), Jerry’s friend Danny (Cheech Marin), and the surprisingly age-appropriate Diane (Jane Seymour). 

Director Tim Hill — whose resumé includes two terrible animation/live-action hybrids, “Alvin and the Chipmunks” (2007) and “Hop” (2011) — doesn’t fare much better when all the actors are flesh-and-blood. They’re all made to act like cartoons, mugging and over-reacting to the pratfalls they must take in service to a hackneyed script by Tom J. Astle and Matt Ember.

The movie is adapted from a novel by Robert Kimmel Smith, who died in April. He may not have been lucky enough to miss this terrible movie, though — because it’s been on the shelf about as long as “The New Mutants” was. Blame production delays, and the fact that its original distributor was Dimension Films, a branch of Hollywood’s pariah corporation, The Weinstein Company. (Another distributor, 101 Studios, bought it off of Weinstein. No matter how much it cost, they paid too much.)

With a movie this ineptly handled and shamelessly predictable, a critic’s mind starts to wander into the actors’ prior connections. It’s interesting that this is the first movie to pair De Niro and Walken since “The Deer Hunter,” back in 1978. And it’s a curiosity to see De Niro playing father to Thurman, when in 1993 they were paired romantically in “Mad Dog and Glory,” when Thurman was 23 and De Niro was 50 — the age Thurman is now. 

“The War With Grandpa,” despite its nod toward nobility with its anti-war message, is a humorless mess of a movie. Skip it at the theaters, and don’t plant your kids in front of the TV when it lands on the small screen. That would be, I think, a violation of the Geneva Convention.

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‘The War With Grandpa’

★

Opening Friday, October 9, in theaters where open. Rated PG for rude humor, language, and some thematic elements. Running time: 94 minutes.