Comedian Bill Burr acutely understands the power of a good rant—how anger has its own unique rhythm and flow. From his first HBO half hour in 2005 through his seven Netflix specials, Burr has built a career out of blowing his stack on stage, righteously and irrationally. Only recently has he found success applying that persona to fictional characters, in films like The King of Staten Island and his semi-autobiographical Netflix animated series F Is for Family. Now Burr returns with his directorial debut: Netflix’s Old Dads (Oct. 20), in which he casts himself as a man whose anger at the modern world threatens his family life.
Jack, Burr’s stand-in, loves being a father to his young son, but he constantly finds himself at odds with the people in his life, like thin-skinned parents or Dr. L (Rachael Harris), the obnoxious principal of his kid’s ultra-progressive private school. His attitude reaches critical mass when he calls Dr. L a “stumpy cunt” at the same time that his sports jersey company is made over by his new “woke” millennial CEO (Miles Robbins), who turns it into a “gender-neutral, carbon-neutral, 21st century lifestyle apparel brand.” In order to help provide for his son, Jack must learn to curb his anger and, alongside friends and company co-founders Connor (Bobby Cannavale) and Mike (Bokeem Woodbine), adjust to the changing times, lest he drive his pregnant wife (Katie Aselton) and child away for good.
Old Dads essentially adapts Burr’s stand-up into a narrative feature by addressing the underlying aggression of his persona. But rhetoric and drama are different beasts, and while Burr can construct strawmen and women on stage to knock down in an entertaining way, they become caricatures when embodied by actors on screen. Jack’s enemies in the film are such broad exaggerations of progressivism that the fictionalized Burr always has the moral high ground. Although Jack hurls a misogynistic slur at Dr. L, no one from any generation would support what provoked the outburst: the condescending glee in which she humiliated Jack for being two minutes late to pick up his child. (Later, she makes him apologize to the whole school in what resembles a show trial.) Jack, Connor, and Mike are fired by their boss for cracking wise about Caitlyn Jenner, but only because their conversation was surreptitiously recorded by a secret camera in a rental car, basically positioning potentially offensive speech against an invasion of privacy.
Every time Jack’s rage or lack of filter gets him into trouble, Burr emphasizes the situation’s inherent unfairness. It’s difficult to take seriously the message of maintaining one’s cool and evolving with the culture when Burr and co-writer Ben Tishler reiterate Jack’s unflinching honesty against a coterie of, for a lack of a better term, woke scolds. (Burr handled the concept of a toxic patriarch and changing cultural tides much better on the 1970s-set F Is for Family, which at least benefited from historical distance.) Jack's wife points out his shortcomings, and Burr pays lip service to the idea that the worst thing an aging Gen X-er can become is a get-off-my-lawn type. The film even makes intermittent efforts to humanize its targets, albeit mostly through their own holier-than-thou ideological purity blowing up in their face. But the underlying idea is still that Jack is almost always right and everyone basically needs to relax or mind their own business.
It would be easier to swallow this argument if Old Dads were consistently funnier. But laughs are few and far between; save for an early scene of Jack losing his patience on the road and a later one of a silent auction gone horribly wrong, the film mostly goes through the motions, mired in its own flawed sense of virtuousness. Burr tries to use his ensemble to explore other perspectives besides his own, but every other character is too thinly sketched to make much of an impact. What remains is Jack’s last-honest-man schtick, and if Burr is willing to grant that it should be tempered through therapy for the sake of his children, he makes sure we know that it’s still justified. Because, as Old Dads argues, millennials areoversensitive hypocrites who can’t wait to police your language or cancel you, but okay, you probably shouldn’t scream at them in public. How hilarious.
