Borrowing a generous amount of thematic elements from some of the most popular contemporary comedies around including half baked, office space, and American pie, Grandma's boy never seems to find it's own voice throughout the derivative plot and performances. To the film's benefit, they do manage to tap into a fairly unique niche market-the video gaming crowd, to deliver some underused stereotypes in their pro-to-geek glory. The main antagonist in particular, while grossly exaggerated, was a pleasure to see come to life on screen, representing the eccentric, antisocial tendencies of the genius video game designer. Sadly the film did not incorporate it's themes of heavy marijuana use as effectively as it's video game theme, somehow making the use of pot feel completely superfluous to the script and somehow thrown in there for blatant appeal to the half-baked set. Being a huge fan of the original weed flicks, it is sad to see Hollywood's ongoing strategy to use pot flicks simply for marketing devices to appeal to younger crowds, while forgetting about the whole content that made the experience in movies like Friday and Half Baked so genuine. All in all, compared to the majority of uninspired laugh out loud comedies that come out lately, you could do a lot worse, provided you are under the age of 25. Grandma's Boy does provide quite a few gut busting moments, just don't expect the replay value to be on par with the great dumb comedies of the past 5, 10 years.
Review of Grandma's Boy
