‘About My Father’ Review: Sebastian Maniscalco & Robert De Niro Team In Unfunny Generational Comedy
25.05.2023 - 02:53
/ deadline.com
If Sebastian Maniscalco really is the most popular comic in the country at the moment, you’d never know why from his film debut in About My Father. So unfunny it’s embarrassing, this is an over-the-top, under-achieving generational comedy that feels like it was written in the mid- to late-1960s and has been moldering in a drawer ever since.
At 79 the oldest person in the cast, Robert de Niro has the most energy of anyone in the cast and employs all the tricks he could think of to help the cause. Still, this mostly plays like a ragged hand-me-down being performed at top volume, as if the dialogue was going to be competing with a laugh track.
One might plausibly presume that this lightweight vehicle was conceived and designed by Maniscalco using elements of his own upbringing so as to surround himself with reliable talent to ease his way into films and possibly expand his career possibilities. Unfortunately, no one stands much of a chance or comes off very well here, as the actors seem like they’ve been asked to perform at full volume and then kick it up one notch further just to make sure you get it.
Austen Earl, a busy writer whose longest television gig was on Happy Together a few years ago, along with co-writer Maniscalco and director Laura Terruso, have tried not to miss any opportunities for PG-13-level crude humor, though this is a rare occasion when De Niro is actually restrained from unleashing the full force of his normally colorful vocabulary.
Here, the protean actor plays an amiable, good-tempered New York hairdresser who needs to have his arm twisted buy his son Sebastian to make the trip to a posh community outside of Washington, D.C., to tend to the bride, Ellie (Leslie Bibb). But almost from the moment