Grandma's Boy - Review

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Rated: R

Distributor: 20th Century Fox

Release Date: 2006-01-06

Starring: Linda Cardellini, Allen Covert, Peter Dante, Shirley Jones, Joel Moore, Kevin Nealon, Doris Roberts, Nick Swarsdon, Jonah Hill, Kelvin Yu, Chuck Church

Directed by Nicholaus Goossen

Produced by Allen Covert, Jack Giarraputo, Adam Sandler

Written by Barry Wernick, Allen Covert, Nick Swarsdon

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Reviewed by Joshua Tyler : 2006-01-07 00:51:40

Grandma's Boy desperately wants to be The 40 Year-Old Virgin. In fact, sometimes it plays as if someone read Virgin's script and thought: "Hey I can do that!" Well they can't. This isn't that kind of film, though you get the sense that's what they were going for. Instead, Grandma's Boy is kind of like Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle crossed with "The Golden Girls". While that's not good enough to lift it off into Steve Carrell's stratosphere or even the world of Harold and Kumar, it's crazy enough that as a mindless stoner/geek comedy it kind of works.

It's the story of a 35-year-old game tester named Alex who gets kicked out of his apartment when is roommate forgets to pay the rent. The guy has a job, maybe not the greatest paying job, but he does have one, so you'd think he'd crash at a hotel or something for a week. Apparently game testers make even less money than I thought. Instead Alex is forced to stay with his grandma and her two equally elderly roommates. To avoid embarrassment, he tells his co-workers that he's staying with three hot chicks, who keep him up every night with whips, chains, and wild antics in bed.

Luckily for the obviously frustrated Alex, Linda Cardellini has just gotten a job as his boss. Plot ensues. Alex smokes a lot of pot, gets Linda to smoke a lot of pot, and then finally gets his grandma smoking pot too. Somewhere in there Grandma's Boy becomes a lot of fun. The best scenes happen in the home of Alex's drug dealer. In his basement you'll find things like karate chopping chimps and tribal witch doctors. A little absurdist pothead humor never hurt anyone. Just ask Cheech and Chong.

Basically, this is a pretty low-brow, hard-R comedy, but one done with a few more laughs than the usual two native to this genre and with a surprisingly talented cast. Allen Covert plays Alex, and while IMDB tells me he's been in nearly 20 movies (most of them starring Adam Sandler), I can't remember seeing him in any one of them. That's a shame, because the guy really has something working as a sort of modern geek avatar. He's got a laid back comic style that serves him well whether he's smoking out with a monkey or playing videogames with grandma. It also doesn't hurt that he's playing of Linda Cardellini, who let's face it, in real life is way too hot to ever have anything to do with Alex. She's also way too talented to be in this movie, but evidently no one in Hollywood agrees with me.

If you're a geek, Grandma's Boy is worth seeing with some equally geek friends after a few brews and a couple of sniper-fests on Halo. If you're not, it's still better than seeing BloodRayne. See Grandma's Boy, kick Uwe Boll in the nuts.

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