Robert De Niro is, without question, one of the greatest actors that the motion picture industry has ever seen. He has the filmography and the shelf full of awards to prove that. And yet, despite the numerous credits to the man’s career over decades, he’s been largely typecast, at least by the audience. We expect to see him in serious dramas, and so when he shows up in a movie like Tim Hill’s The War with Grandpa, it all feels very strange. Still, we’ve seen De Niro do great comedy before, so The War with Grandpa doesn’t necessarily need to feel like a great actor going through the motions in a movie that’s beneath him. I mean, it is exactly that; it just didn’t need to be.
