They should have called me for help with the title for the De Niro-Stallone boxing comedy “Grudge Match.” “Aging Bulls” might be too obvious, but how about “Raging Prostate”? Given the incessant squabbling between the leads, “The Rocky Horror Bitching Show” might have worked, or maybe they should have kept it simple and called it “MoobFellas.”
What they can’t call it is funny. “Grudge Match” is one of those high-concept projects that must have sounded good on paper, if that paper were parchment. Even the audience at whom the movie is aimed — the crowd for whom dinner and a movie means meeting up at 3 p.m. — will be bored by the stale funk coming off every scene. Sample of wit on offer? “Wanna hear a noise? It’s gonna be you cryin’.” Or, “I say women are more verbal than men and they go, ‘Huh.’ ”
Sylvester Stallone and Robert De Niro are rival Pittsburgh pugilists who, after each provided the other’s sole defeat in the ring 30 years ago, never fought a third time because Kid (De Niro) slept with Razor’s (Stallone) girl Sally (Kim Basinger). Razor went back to work at the local factory; Kid became a professional jerk doing sad, late-LaMotta comedy at his “Knocked Out Restaurant and Dinner Theater.”
That’s the first clue that the movie’s going to aim for a low-level meta feel, with references to each actor’s famous boxing movie. After the two enemies butt heads while working on a video-game version of their rivalry (roughly the same idea sparked 2006’s “Rocky Balboa”), and agree to step into the ring one more time, Stallone drinks a glass of raw eggs while saying, “Seems like a lot of cholesterol.” He’ll also start to take a swing at a side of meat. His manager (Alan Arkin) stops him: “We’re just here to buy a little dinner, you don’t have to punch everything.” Because naturally a meat locker full of 150-pound slabs is where you’d go to pick up a meal for two.
As we kill time waiting for what must be the first boxing match in which the jockstraps are sponsored by Depends, the plot unfolds dismally. Sally’s son (Jon Bernthal) from her one-nighter with Kid arrives to reconcile with his dad and serve as the old man’s trainer. Meanwhile, Sally explains to Razor that her infidelity was just a misunderstanding, and off they go on long, romantic walks together. Comedian Kevin Hart, as the promoter, pops in every few scenes to issue high-pitched screams, seemingly channeling some combination of Chris Tucker and Eddie Murphy, but he’s about as funny as arthritis.
Everyone around the two geezers provides advice that you wish Stallone and De Niro’s agents would give them, like “A great performer knows when it’s time to get off the stage, Kid.” Yet each man repeatedly knocks down younger professionals, undercutting the movie’s grumpy-old-men premise. Are we laughing at these guys’ Scotch-and-flapjacks diet (Kid) or hobby of twisting scrap metal into ugly knickknacks (Razor)? Or is the joke on us for not realizing that they’re just a few pull-ups away from the top fighting form they show in the ring at the end?
The biggest failure is that both characters seem so phony that you can’t possibly care who wins the big fight. All you can do is marvel at the brutalities visited on Stallone’s face before he even stepped in the ring: His plastic surgeon must have been a true artist, because his features look to have been rearranged by
Picasso.