This sitcom-style comedy pairs the tired premise of the playboy finding his true love with a mildly novel one about his efforts to score a new love for his widowed grandfather. Eighty-three-year-old Andy Griffith plays eighty-four-year-old Grandpa Joe. It would be nice to report that it’s a great comeback for the Matlock star, but the script isn’t there. Paul Campbell, of the 2008 version of Knight Rider, is the playboy grandson, who also plies his slick moves as a car salesman, not unlike the car salesman/playboy Jeremy Piven played in The Goods: Live Hard * Sell Hard. This writing/directing debut by Marc Fienberg isn’t as crass as that, but it does rely too much on easy gags about old people and sex. And to show us how the playboy has bonded with his true love (Marla Sokoloff), Fienberg relies on the old standby of the stunning coincidence. (They both carry around imported-from-England Curlee Wurlee chocolate bars. Yeah, sure.)
Overall, the movie is breezy and innocuous, and watching old Joe apply his grandson’s how-to-pick-up-girls techniques on nursing-home lovelies is sometimes amusing, if also forced at times. (Decide for yourself which it is when Joe, attempting some newly learned slang, refers to himself as a “chick maggot.”) And speaking of forced, it’s got one of these endings that is so pseudo-clever that it makes the whole movie seem insincere, even if it does surprise you.
IMDB link
viewed 8/25/09 (screening at Ritz Bourse) and reviewed 8/28 and 8/31/09
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