Grudge Match
(2013)
I have to admit, I though the conceit of Grudge Match was a pretty good one. It’s
difficult to tell if it bombed because everyone else thought differently, or it
was simply that the finished picture is frequently on the ropes. Maybe the
Stallone renaissance was so 2007, or maybe the puzzled one was trying his hand
at his most rewarding genre; comedy. Maybe the most interesting thing about a
De Niro performance these days is how much his nose has grown over the past
decade. Grudge Match isn’t actively
bad, well sometimes it is, but it’s obvious in the most tiresome of ways. A
movie that might have been quite clever and sparky just coasts on automatic
pilot.
Old guys movies have been in fully aging swing recently, but
they haven’t been finding the audience of Best
Exotic Marigold Hotel. Probably because they want to be debauched and crude
rather than gentle and heart-warming; others include Stand up Guys and Last Vegas
(that one did reasonably well). Commonly they have found once-great performers
slumming it with sloppy scripts and stodgy scenarios. This one has the
irresistible pitch of Rocky vs Raging Bull (despite the unlikelihood of
their respective weights with regard to such a bout).
Henry “Razor” Sharp (Sly) was beaten by Billy “The Kid”
McDonnen (Bobby) in 1982. Then Razor emerged victorious in a 1984 fight and
subsequently retired (because The Kid slept with his girlfriend Sally, Kim
Basinger). Since then, The Kid has petulantly chewed over his desire for a
deciding rematch; he runs a car dealership and owns a bar so he doesn’t need
the money, it’s all about his pride. He also does stand-up (see what they did
they’re; they’re so clever, these writer guys!) Stallone, meanwhile, is in full
blue-collar mode devoting his time to the shipyard like Springsteen never went
out of fashion. So the lines are familiar straightaway; De Niro playing up the
boorish wiseguy persona while Stallone does the noble warrior thing. Both these
guys fought in ‘Nam, though. Ain’t that something. No cliché left unchecked.
Along for the supporting roles are Alan Arkin as Razor’s old
trainer. No matter how hopeless the material, Arkin emerges unscathed (just as
he did in Stand Up Guys), and here
his surly banter with Kevin Hart’s promoter is one of the few parts of the picture
that actually ekes laughs (although the less said about the “hilarious” bucket
of horse piss, the better). LL Cool J pops up in a role that involves having
his arse handed to him by an old guy, so he must be desperate for cash or have
lost all sense of pride (NCIS: Los
Angeles will probably do that to you).
Jon Bernthal retains dignity as The
Kid’s son, although to be honest he could have equally played Razor’s.
Bernthal’s a great actor, and if someone really has to remake Escape from New
York they couldn’t go wrong with him. He also has a precocious brat of a
son allowing for antics with Granddad Bob (much of which revolve around an
extremely poor taste blow job gag). Basinger has the thankless girlfriend role
(with the honour of draping herself over sweaty old Stallone) although she
looks fantastic for 60, which must be some compensation.
The plot follows the expected course; reluctance to get back
in the ring (on Razor’s part), followed by training montage bullshit (The Kid
is out of shape, not that you’d ever have thought it looking at De Niro). Right
on cue, when it looks as if everything is looking good pre-fight, everything
has to fall apart before to instil some “tension” into the decision to fight
after all. There are also supposed to be whole barrels of laughs involved but
Peter Segal’s never been the kind of director to settle for comedy gold, not
when pleasantly predictable will do. Tim Kelleher co-wrote the screenplay with
Rodney Rothman; the former’s credentials, as a Two and a Half Men stalwart, are impugnable, but we might expect
more from Rothman who has worked with Phil Lord and Christopher Miller.
The movie is as full of adolescent vulgarity, much of it
involving the aging process, as a PG-13/12A will allow. It’s akin to a “family”
Adam Sandler movie, or one of those cash-grab Ben Stiller efforts. Utterly
characterless. In that sense, one might expect it to do reasonably well,
although both their stars have been on the wane of late too. Arkin can almost
make it fly (“Man, are you going to be
feisty when you hit puberty” he tells Hart). Stallone reminds us that he
was only ever any good in comedies when he played the straight man; don’t waste
good lines on him (although, with the likes of “Isn’t anybody here going to rape this guy?” he isn’t exactly being
thrown pearls). De Niro has so little shame left, he even does a Dancing with the Stars bit.
Everyone learns something from their experience, which is
nice; they go into it for the money but come out with something even better.
Love, and family. And money. It’s the American Dream, or retch. The makers
clearly didn’t learn that a Mike Tyson cameo is a very bad thing, however. His
continued veneration is mystifying. As for the match, the only means of making it
remotely convincing is having Razor blind in one eye, and even that doesn’t do
the trick. Sly’s steroids are going to outmatch De Niro’s 70-year old moobs any
day. I’m most likely making the picture out to be worse than it is, but it’s so
utterly pedestrian and formulaic on every level that it deserves recriminations
for the waste of the talent involved and the decent kernel of an idea at its
centre. If you want to see a decent De Niro/Stallone movie, check out Copland.
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