The War with Grandpa (2020)

The War with Grandpa arrives with the unmistakable aroma of a vintage that has been sitting in the cellar too long. Filmed in 2017 and released three years later, after its original distributor collapsed, it concerns a boy named Peter who surrenders his bedroom to his widowed grandfather and then declares a prank war over the real estate. Robert De Niro, Uma Thurman, Christopher Walken, Jane Seymour and Cheech Marin are all present, presumably for the catering. The conflict is domestic, the stakes are furniture, and nobody involved evinces the slightest interest in addressing the culture waiting for them on the other side of the release date.

The film's social consciousness is essentially nil, and it wears that vacancy like a comfortable cardigan. Cheech Marin and Juliocesar Chavez appear among the ensemble, but the casting is standard sitcom-family arithmetic with no representational ambition behind it. The women (Uma Thurman's Sally, Laura Marano's Mia, the younger sister) occupy the customary roles of disapproving parent and secretive teenager, and Mia's boyfriend subplot is played for gags about parental suspicion, not empowerment. Race, class, climate and body image go entirely unexamined. The grandfather's fumbling with self-checkout scanners is generational comedy, not a diagnosis. No lesson is delivered, no sermon is preached, and the only moral on offer is that a boy should probably get along with his grandfather.

A mild current of inclusion runs through the kid friend group, which seats a girl among the boys, and the family is comfortably middle-class in a way that invites no critique of anything. This is a relic, and it knows it. It topped the domestic box office in its opening weekend largely because there was nothing else in theaters. We score it accordingly: a film with no agenda, no message, and no interest in being anything other than what it is.