Bill Burr's 'Old Dads' Is as Irrelevant as It Is Unfunny

Bill Burr can be an interesting comedian, a guy like Dave Chappelle capable of being terrifically insightful in one breath and an absolute asshole in the next; although being an asshole is often part of Burr’s charm. In his stand-up acts, he pushes buttons, but unlike Ricky Gervais, he typically does not push buttons for the sake of pushing them. There are a lot of anti-woke hacks in comedy, but Burr is anti-PC, and there is a subtle distinction.

There is nothing subtle, however, about Old Dads, a sh**ty movie not because of Burr’s comedy but in spite of it. It’s a hack job. Bill Burr, who directed the movie and co-wrote it with Bill Tishler, is a better stand-up than he is a director or actor. He’s a bad screenwriter, to boot. My guess is that Netflix gave Bill Burr all the freedom he wanted to make a movie that trades in offensive slurs, but Burr still made a profoundly inept, toothless, poorly constructed, 90-minute Kevin James movie. It’s an embarrassing sell-out job, the kind of sh**ty, inferior product that Burr himself would typically make fun of.

Mostly, it’s a lazy film, which feels more like three lousy sitcom episodes poorly stitched together. There’s barely an arc. Burr plays Jack. In one sitcom episode, he’s been fired from the company he and his friends, Conner (Bobby Cannavale) and Mike (Bokeem Woodbine), built together because they were caught on camera in a rental car making inappropriate comments (the sequence in the car mostly sees Mike successfully compel a young, white co-worker to say the N-word). In another sitcom episode, Jack gets in trouble with his pregnant wife, Leah (Katie Aselton), because he called the principal of their toddler’s preschool (Rachael Harris) the C-word, and he spends the rest of the movie trying to dig himself out of that hole. The third sitcom episode is about three friends forced to deal with their awful wives, one of whom is a nag, the other a shrew, and the third of whom is not even a wife but a girlfriend who desperately wants to be the wife of a man twice her age who barely appears to even like her.

As it is with most of his stand-up, it is the women who are the source of most of his derision/comedy. He can be perceptive when he takes on woke scolds, but Burr still tells “take my wife” jokes in 2023. Old Dads feels like a bad comedy from the early aughts. At one point, Bobby Cannavale even makes the same “on fleek” joke that everyone has made since Tina Fey in 2006. I love Cannavale and Woodbine, but they can’t elevate the material. They’re victims of it, particularly Cannavale, who is stuck in a storyline with an authoritarian wife who won’t let him hang out with his friends.

It’s embarrassing. The entire film is. This cannot possibly be the movie that Burr set out to make because it feels like a movie he gave up on after a quick first draft. It feels like a movie written by someone who just wanted to get it over with.

There’s no point to the film except so that Burr can say, “woke parents sure are annoying, aren’t they?” Sure! Maybe. He could probably wring some great comedy out of that setup. Instead, Burr opts to try and bait woke parents into social media meltdowns by calling someone a tr*nny or a fa**ot so that Burr can cry about how sensitive they are. The jokes, however, are so limp and obvious that his attempts to get a rise out of “social justice warriors” just come off as pathetic, like a grade-school kid making “your mom” jokes to a classmate with two dads. At least try to be relevant, Mr. Burr, instead of telling jokes recycled from old episodes of According to Jim.