Film Review – Old Dads

Stand-up comedian and occasional actor Bill Burr makes his directorial debut with “Old Dads,” and he’s looking to play to his strengths with the feature (sharing scripting duties with Ben Tishler). Here’s a story about a fiftysomething man trying to understand the world around him, with his Gen X sensibilities rubbing up against modern ways of communication and understanding, navigating a society where people attempt to understand feelings instead of immediately mocking them. I won’t use the W-word because Burr doesn’t use the W-word, but “Old Dads” seems like it really wants to be about the W-word, awkwardly squeezing the square peg-ness of the comic’s stage act into the round hole of moviemaking, becoming a viewing experience about bits, not storytelling. Burr isn’t stretching here, doing what he always does, resulting in a pedestrian endeavor that barely has any laughs and doesn’t thoughtfully challenge the ways of the world or actively address the plight of frightened men of a certain age struggling with irrelevancy. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com