"An Obscene Sendup of Being Woke"
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What You Need To Know:
Basically, OLD DADS is Bill Burr taking his onstage rants and shoving them into a story with other characters. Nearly everyone outside of his wife and friends is woke. These side characters are all annoyingly cliched, despite the good points Jack makes about being woke. Also, Burr’s first-time direction is largely flat, and the music score is aggravatingly lazy and boring. Finally, one friend in OLD DADS has a cocaine habit, there’s a nude scene at a strip club, and the foul language count is through the roof.
Content:
(B, PaPa, C, AB, ACAC, LLL, VV, SS, NN, A, DD, MM): Dominant Worldview and Other Worldview Content/Elements: Movie winds up with a very weak moral worldview but one character snorts cocaine, there’s constant swearing and married men go to a strip club, though the men make extended requests for forgiveness from wives, who grant it, as the men claim they want to start improved lives, and one unmarried man who resents that his girlfriend is pregnant winds up excited to have the baby and proposes marriage to her, plus one man makes a comment about prosperity preacher Joel Osteen, “Once you get past the God [blank], he’s got a positive message,” and movie is tremendously anti-woke, as the lead characters mock homosexuals and especially lax parenting and teaching by woke teachers, the lead male character ultimately goes to therapy and learns to control his anger, while another man who hated the fact his girlfriend is pregnant ultimately is happy about having a child and proposes to his girlfriend; Foul Language: At least 202 obscenities (more than 170 “f” words), two light profanities, many vulgarities, and a man says the “n” word 10 times when he’s forced to rap the word by a black man; Sex: The three lead married males go to a strip club and have lap dances from strippers wearing skimpy thongs that reveal their rear ends and expose their breasts as well (the scene attempts to play this for laughs, not sexual intensity), plus many vulgar sex terms are uttered; Nudity: Strippers expose their rear ends in thongs and their breasts while gyrating sensually in the three married lead males’ laps; Alcohol Use: Some alcohol use; Smoking and/or Drug Use and Abuse: One of the lead males snorts cocaine loudly throughout the movie, including in front of a child he’s supposed to look after, and never has consequences, though he tells his wife in a half-hearted apology at end of movie, “I don’t want to live this way anymore” about his general debauched life; Miscellaneous Immorality: The main character is almost constantly angry and yells at all types of people in many kinds of situations, though he ultimately learns to be calm and kinder, one man tells another “If you don’t want a baby, get an abortion. Flush it,” although the movie has a pro-baby, pro-marriage resolution.
More Detail:
Bill Burr is a superstar standup comedian who shot to fame by being the most daringly anti-woke performer in the comedy world. He’s had several Netflix comedy specials and is a frequent supporting actor in TV and movies. Burr makes his co-writing and directing debut with the new comedy movie OLD DADS, streaming on Netflix.
OLD DADS is blatantly anti-woke and takes some refreshing shots at parents who let their children run all over them and woke schools. Sadly, though, it wallows in strongly offensive language from start to finish, along with portraying married men in a strip club complete with female nudity, while inserting one character’s extremely frequent cocaine habit, which is played for laughs.
Burr plays Jack, a harried middle-aged man who owns an advertising agency with his two best friends, Connor (Bobby Cannavale) and Mike (Bokeem Woodbine). Jack loudly and obnoxiously seems to yell at just about everyone and everything. While this fits Burr’s stage act in hilarious fashion (if you can overlook his swearing, he’s very conservative and anti-woke), it’s annoying most of the time here because the rants are thrust in other characters’ faces.
Jack and his friends suddenly find themselves kicked out of their own ad agency because they had sold it earlier, and there was a clause they overlooked saying they could be removed if they were detrimental to the company. Aspen, their young mid-20s boss, smugly tells them they’re too old to represent the younger-targeted products the agency wants to start promoting. The men also discover that Aspen tricked them out of being paid severance or any share of profits.
The firing scene is one of the sporadic scenes that work humorously, as the three former owners give Aspen angry diatribes that are profane but very funny. Their lines are sharply aimed attacks on the woke world’s disregard for older workers, and its complete focus on young people only.
Jack also faces trouble with his young son’s school, as he constantly butts heads with the incredibly woke and smug principal. He turns a school fundraiser into a disaster with an annoying tirade that’s also tiresome for viewers. With Jack’s wife angry at him, Mike’s pregnant girlfriend troubled that he seems upset about her having a baby, and Connor fighting with his wife about his debauchery and the fact that she totally controls their marriage, the three men return to Aspen to beg to get their jobs back from him.
They get them back, but on one condition. They must track down a very old man who’s become famous on the Internet for the incredible lengths he’s gone to live “off the grid.” Aspen wants the old man to be the spokesman for a new line of products. So, he sends Jack, Mike and Connor on the road to find him and win him over to a deal to star in commercials.
As the three men jaunt through the desert, they argue about everything under the sun from an anti-woke perspective. Eventually, they wind up visiting a strip club, where they make some major decisions about their lives.
Can they accomplish their mission and save their jobs? Can they save their relationships? Will Jack ever stop shouting?
As mentioned, OLD DADS is basically Bill Burr taking his onstage rants and shoving them into the context of a plot with other characters. Nearly everyone he encounters outside of his wife and friends is woke. However, these side characters are all annoyingly cliched, even though the underlying points Jack makes are often refreshing to see from an anti-woke, more conservative perspective.
Burr’s first-time direction in OLD DADS is largely flat, and the music score is aggravatingly lazy, boring and constant. Connor has a cocaine habit that’s played for laughs and has no consequences, while Mike and Connor have a couple of truly sickening lines joking that Mike’s girlfriend should have an abortion since Mike doesn’t want a child with her. Also, the foul language count is absolutely through the roof.
OLD DADS has Jack and Mike decide to do the right things in life at the end, but their attempts at redemption come off as lazy writing simply to have for a happy ending rather than for any real emotional power.
Altogether, OLD DADS is a largely unpleasant viewing experience that media-wise viewers will want to avoid.
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