Old Dads (2023) – Retire

IMPORTANT NOTE: This piece was written during the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike. Without the labor of the actors currently on strike, the movies being covered here wouldn’t exist.

Released: 20th October
Seen: 1st November

Every now and then a stand-up comic takes a chance and makes a leap from the stages of the comedy clubs to the bright lights of Hollywood to star in movies. So many greats have tried this, legends like Steve Martin, Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy all have shown you can be great at stand up and as a movie actor. Others take their stand-up acts and turn it into a movie or TV show, this is how we got Seinfeld, The Machine or Trainwreck. Sometimes though people take the personality they’ve created for the stage and craft an entire movie around it, which can sometimes work wonderfully – and sometimes you get something like Old Dads, a film that takes Bill Burr’s style of angry comedy and fits it around the eternally fun conversation of how different the generations are… that’s a topic that never gets old, no sir.

Old Dads tells a classic story of three men in their mid-50s trying to understand how come everything is so different nowadays despite them having lived on earth for the last 50 years. The three men in question are Jack Kelly (Bill Burr), Connor Brody (Bobby Cannavale) and Mike Richards (Bokeem Woodbine) who have recently sold their business to a young entrepreneur who immediately fires everyone over 35 (except our three leads, because they’re special) and makes the company carbon/gender/politically-neutral because that’s what young people do. Throughout the interminable runtime our main characters get fired, deal with school shit, argue with their families and in general keep running into the issue of them being older and everyone else being insane except for them because that’s how the world works.

Old Dads, on one specific level, is genius. It almost begs you to be offended at it, especially if you’re in one of the younger generations that the bulk of the film is aiming its attacks at (I would call them jokes but that implies a laugh or some form of comedic structure) so that the second you call it out the response can be “oh you were just triggered/offended by how real it is”. It’s almost critic-proof in that way because that issue of how it touches on the generational divide is where most of the problems come from and there is a certain audience who is going to see that critique and brush it off. If you’re part of that audience then congrats, Old Dads is for you. If you wanna laugh at how much millennials suck without thinking about it for even a second then this is going to work for you… I mean, as long as “Millenials suck” is enough of a joke for you because there isn’t any actual substance to this damn thing.

From the very moment Old Dads starts it’s very clear the tone that it’s taking, namely that everyone except Bill Burr specifically is insane and he’s the only truth-teller left on the planet. His way is the only way, every other kind of parenting or lifestyle choice is stupid and makes no damn sense and that’s the entire joke. Millennials especially get the brunt of the mockery but Gen X, Bill Burr’s generation, are perfectly fine and never make any mistakes because their way of doing things is objectively correct. Everyone who isn’t of Bill Burr’s age is portrayed as an unfunny parody of what people in Facebook comment sections think a young person is, they speak entirely in terms that the writer read in a tweet once without understanding the full context while he is portrayed as the downtrodden everyman who is put upon by everyone… and never tells a single fucking joke.

Look, you can absolutely make fun of the younger generations all you want. Hell, we have it coming a lot of the time and there’s absolutely a ton of material available to work with but none of that material appears here. What’s here is a bunch of cliches or attempted jokes from a decade ago that’re being blindly regurgitated without purpose or timing, sometimes without logic. At one point Bill Burr’s character yells “Your generation and the data” to his wife when she brings up some parenting info… the actress playing the wife is 10 years younger than Bill, putting her in the same generation as him. Now a joke might involve her yelling back “We’re the same age, you moron” or something to that effect, maybe make fun of how that’s his go-to attack but that would mean Old Dads was meant to make you laugh and if that was the intent it failed. If, however, the intent was to preach to older generations and tell them that they’re actually right about everything then mission accomplished.

The extra annoying thing is that there are moments when this idea of a generational divide leads to a half-decent scene, such as when the guys are on a car ride with a millennial and after the millennial calls them out for sexism (because apparently, that’s all Millenials do, every single millennial in Old Dads just calls out every possible slight known to man) they counter by finding out that this guy likes rap music and particular N.W.A, leading to an awkward moment where the character is questioned about if they sing the N-word when they sing along to those songs. It’s a decent moment, pointing out the hypocrisy of the extremely puritanical elements of the younger generation who will be the first to call out other people while doing similar things themselves. It’s a fairly intelligent idea that kind of goes to shit when this same trip is revisited and the guys are just being brutally transphobic for no reason but the idea is there. There’s also a moment when an argument happens and our main character seeks backup from someone who turns out to be a bigot, which also makes somewhat of a good point but you know what it doesn’t make? A joke. 

Perhaps that’s the biggest problem that Old Dads has, there isn’t a single fucking joke to be found here unless the entire joke is “Look at these young people, aren’t they fucking annoying?” and sure, if you build an entire generation out of straw then I guess you’ll amuse people who like laughing at straw men but you could also try something known as a setup or a punchline, things I didn’t think I’d have to say about a film written by a comedian like Bill Burr but apparently I do. I’ve seen this man’s work, I know for a fact he can be funny and can actually make a good point about the problems in society when he tries to. Hell, he’s done stuff about political correctness before that’s made some great points about how it goes too far sometimes and it’s made his points spectacularly… but oh god he doesn’t do that here. There’s no wit, no intelligence, nothing being said that’s worth listening to. It’s preaching to a choir who probably need their grandkids to help them find this fucking movie on Netflix. 

To give Old Dads something of a compliment, it must be admitted that it does look good. Despite the flaws of the script, visually this is actually pretty well done and everyone gives good enough performances where you can tell that they had trust in their director. For a directorial debut, Old Dads is not a bad-looking film. It’s trying to make the most out of what was on the page and considering the caliber of talent that showed up it suggests that Bill has got a talent for directing that might help him out if he eventually finds a good script to work with, hopefully not another vanity project (he wrote, directed and starred in the damn thing, that’s a vanity project if I ever saw one) on a technical level the man can direct and despite how much I don’t like the script, I will be curious to see what happens if Bill directs again. 

You know that scene in the Simpsons where Skinner says the now memetic line “Am I so out of touch? No, it’s the children who are wrong …” that’s Old Dads except it lasts for an hour and a half and you’re not meant to think the guy saying it is in any way wrong. Old Dads is a generational comedy by someone who doesn’t understand the younger generations enough to make any actual jokes about them and is too pompous to take any decent shots at his own generation. It’s the kind of film that thinks the idea of a joke begins and ends with “Man, aren’t these people who I have completely lied about just so fucking stupid?” and doesn’t bother to do anything beyond that.

There are no jokes, no characters worth caring about and no points to be made. No one learns, no one grows, no one acts like a real person except for the main character who is always right even when he’s demonstrably wrong. It’s a painfully unfunny film to sit through even if you agree with its worldview but if you don’t… Well, again, you can’t really complain about it can you? Old Dads has the ultimate defense that it can pull without a second thought to why it gets this reaction. Maybe the joke that I spent 100 minutes searching for was the fact that I expected a joke to be told in the first place.