Judd Apatow has spent much of the 21st century showing America how dudes become men, his films built coming-of-age-like narratives for overgrown juveniles well into legal adulthood. In Knocked Up, Seth Rogen and Paul Rudd respectively modeled irresponsibility for twenty and thirtysomethings, and with This is 40, Rudd’s character stared down the barrel of middle age; in all cases, they arrived at the crucial realization that they need to stop clinging to vestiges of immaturity so they can provide for the people they care about. For these schlubs, the desire to stay young forever meant smoking weed during the daytime, bumping Wu-Tang with your friends and going to rock shows without getting your wife’s permission. For an ensemble in their 50s, however, rejecting the onward march of time becomes a far dicier proposition.
In Bill Burr’s dire directorial debut Old Dads, our boys Jack (Burr), Connor (Bobby Cannavale), and Mike (Bokeem Woodbine) mostly pine for the past as a golden age when they could get away with anything, before wokeness came in and started pussifying all the alpha males. They literally deal in masculine nostalgia, as the co-founders of a throwback jersey retailer they’ve just sold to a dweeby millennial CEO (Miles Robbins) who will soon use cancel culture to oust them after they’re caught on a mic deadnaming Caitlyn Jenner. Fresh out of a job and each saddled with the duties of a different stage of parenthood, they must adapt or face the prospect of a long, cold and lonely future, a greying Apatovian rehash right down to the wake-up-call Vegas road trip nicked from Knocked Up’s second act. Of course they’ll get their collective act together, but they will not be happy about it, and as they continue to rail against a tolerant present they eventually succumb to rather than accept, neither will we.
A seasoned standup of prickly comic powers, Burr makes himself sound like a reactionary Jerry Seinfeld routine in the script he co-authored with Ben Tishler. You ever notice how the only ones to use those stupid electric scooters are low-testosterone losers? Or the way that there’s never a parking spot when you drop your kid off at their overpriced bougie elementary school? And what’s the deal with pronouns?! He passes off stale gripes as observations, self-styled as the last voice honest enough to repeat the Top 40 grievances gleaned from a few minutes’ scrolling on Facebook. The most cutting joke comes when Burr’s willing to dish it out to himself instead of everyone and everything else, as a stranger agrees with a delighted Jack’s anti-vaping stance, then goes on a tirade about those good-for-nothing immigrants. Then, she farts.
Being a bastard acquaints a person with unsavory bedfellows, drives away their loved ones, and as suggested by a cautionary tale rideshare driver, ultimately coot-ifies them until they’ve become Bruce Dern. The executives from Netflix refer to this archetype as “crusty but benign”, but Burr’s bile really tests that second bit. While Cannavale and Woodbine portray two closely related species of well-meaning boob, the curmudgeonly Jack has a true bitter edge to him, though he always stops short of overt hatefulness even as he radiates annoyance with everything. In a critical moment, the coarse righteousness of the bulwark who told off Joe Rogan for peddling misinformation shines through: he’s only so fed up with all sensitivity crap because so many of its proponents act out of wariness for social ostracizing rather than genuine virtue. Maybe that’s a cynical way to look at respecting others, but that’s just the kind of guy he is, take him or leave him.
In his mandate to retire the un-PC-and-proud rageaholic act or find a new family, Jack faces the same exact dilemma as Ari Gold from Entourage, a program with a comparably – if less knowingly – dated take on manhood. It’s more perceptible in Burr’s sampler of midlife crises, but the specter of death hangs over both, a shared fear that relinquishing bro-time to be a dutiful husband puts a person that much closer to mortality. (Like Nora Ephron before him, Cannavale’s character feels bad about his neck.) Viewers expecting Jack to make his peace with this by finding something to appreciate in the modern world would be sorely mistaken, his growth limited to the realization that curses cause the least trouble when muttered under-breath out of earshot instead of yelled into the offending party’s face. That’s not nothing, and yet it is very barely something, hardly enough to build a movie around. The years to come will not be kind to Jack, surrounding him with more and more reasons to feel befuddled and aggravated, testing his resolve to say nothing while he fantasizes about their slow, painful demise. And that should be workable, from a comic standpoint. When not being used to grind dull culture-war axes, sputtering impotent anger is a comedy staple. It just needs to be funnier than this.
Old Dads is now available on Netflix
