Robert De Niro’s flimsy excuse for his many terrible comedies: “It can be gruesome”
Most actors have made some pretty bad films, but Robert De Niro is up there as arguably the greatest Hollywood icon to have sidestepped quality in favour of an easy cheque.
It’s a shame, because his career started off really well with era-defining performances in the likes of Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, and, of course, The Godfather Part II. The landscape of Hollywood in the 1970s had drastically changed from the days of studio-bound productions, and as a more auteur-driven style of filmmaking dominated the mainstream, actors like De Niro, who had an innate grittiness that served these introspective yet violent parts well, triumphed.
Playing Vito Corleone in Francis Ford Coppola’s epic gangster movie – the younger version of Marlon Brando’s character from the first film – meant he had big boots to fill, but he pulled the performance off terrifically.
It seemed like De Niro could hardly put a foot wrong, with roles in everything from The Deer Hunter and Raging Bull to Once Upon a Time in America and Brazil cementing him as a Hollywood heavyweight. Of course, he made a few missteps, as most actors do, but for the most part, he spent the first few decades of his career proving his genius.
That’s until his career took a shift in a curious direction — somewhere around the beginning of the 21st century — and De Niro suddenly started to appear in many terrible films. More specifically, he kept choosing to appear in bad comedy movies, starting with The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle, a bizarre mix of live-action and animation, in 2000. Perhaps this was the start of his downfall, because just look at the animation style. It’s atrocious.
De Niro soon appeared in Showtime, a terrible buddy-cop film in which he starred opposite Eddie Murphy, although various other comedic endeavours around this time, like Meet the Parents, fared very well. By the 2010s, however, he found himself in various panned movies supposedly meant to make us laugh. From Little Fockers to New Year’s Eve, The Big Wedding, The Family, Dirty Grandpa, The War With Grandpa, and About My Father, De Niro seemed to have a penchant for lazy comedies, especially those where he gets to play a filthy old man. It makes you shudder.
While the actor has managed to make some great films in between, like Silver Linings Playbook, The Irishman, and Killers of the Flower Moon, it wouldn’t be unfair to say that he has certainly pockmarked his career with such terrible comedy choices.
De Niro has tried to defend these decisions; however, his excuses aren’t exactly that strong. Talking to The Independent, he explained, “Comedies are harder to do than people think. Also, it depends on what type of comedy I’m asked to do. It can be gruesome when the director doesn’t know how to make you funny, or what your sensibility is, or you fail to have a mutual understanding about what you both think comedy is. It can be slapstick funny, or another funny.”
He added about working with a director on comedies, “You have to work with a director who respects what you can do and encourages you instead of imposing something on you that you can’t do”. Clearly, it seems like the kind of comedy that De Niro believes he can do best is the kind that requires him to play old men with slightly questionable behaviour.
