Review: Bill Burr & Friends Scream, Yell And Curse Through A Way-Over-The-Top Netflix Comedy

Sound like his typical stand-up comedy. Most woke critics are trashing it. The Imdb rating will be much higher than critic's Metascore.

https://deadline.com/2023/10/old-dads-review-bill-burr-netflix-1235578860/

Three fiftysomething jerks extend their adolescence way, way beyond the breaking point in Old Dads, a boorish and obnoxiously vulgar comedy that, since it can’t claim any other great distinction, might well have been expressly written to break the all-time record for use of the f-word in the major studio movie. Even Lenny Bruce might be twitching in his grave over this one.

All the same, director/co-writer Bill Burr has more often than not had his finger on the pulse of the populace, so this slap-dash-feeling Netflix offering likely will prove a solid audience-pleaser.

The plot’s trigger point has good-looking, full-of-himself twentysomething mogul Aspen Bell (Mike Robbins) firing the old-timers, which really takes the brakes off the over-the-hill mob. This leads before long to verbal volleying about body shaming, a statute of limitations on the f-word, a discussion of what to do when someone drops the n-word and heated discussions of numerous further hot-button usages that seem to be OK to use here as long as they’re put in the mouths of genealogically out-of-it white guys. They yelling goes on and on and on.

The yelling and screaming and recriminations pour out of characters’ mouths here as if they were in competition with Niagara Falls, and it can’t be said that Burr doesn’t have know the inner workings of these middle-aged men who behave and feel as though they’re being socially ostracized. But the guys bring it on themselves for trying to stretch their adolescence almost until it’s time to buy their burial plots.

Burr isn’t making this stuff up, as there is a core of thematic seriousness here concerning middle-aged big babies, but it’s so coarse and seriously over the top in its quest for laughs that it’s hard to switch gears sufficiently to take Old Dads seriously — as if Burr is trying to deliver a report from the socially changing front.