About My Father review: A talented cast, but where are the laughs?

No matter how heartwarming the relationships may be, every joke in De Niro's latest outing falls flat

Robert De Niro as Salvo in About My Father. Photo: Lionsgate

If you’re judging a comedy on laughs, then About My Father would be a failure.

That’s because it has none. In fact you’re more likely to groan with despair than come close to even smiling. This is all the more remarkable when you consider the talent involved. About My Father is co-written by and stars Sebastian Maniscalco, who has become one of the highest-selling stand-up comedians in America over the past few years.

Maniscalco plays a fictional version of himself in About My Father. Rather than being a stand-up comedian, he is a hotel manager in Chicago who lives with his girlfriend Ellie (Leslie Bibb). Sebastian is so deeply in love that he is finally prepared to propose. When Ellie invites him to her family’s holiday home for the July 4 weekend he sees it as the perfect occasion to pop the question.

There’s just one problem. After the death of his mother earlier that year, Sebastian doesn’t want to leave his father Salvo (Robert De Niro) alone for the celebration. Ellie has the perfect solution. She invites Salvo to join them so their families can finally meet.

This causes only more issues for Sebastian, because he knows that his cynical, intense and traditional Italian immigrant father is likely to be completely at odds with Ellie’s incredibly rich and conservative family.

This includes her mother Tigger (Kim Cattrall), a US senator, father Bill (David Rasche), the manager of a series of really expensive hotels that rival Sebastian’s establishment, and her brothers Lucky (Anders Holm) and Doug (Brett Dier), who are the definition of white privilege.

Sebastian soon starts to become embarrassed by Salvo, who then has to decide whether to tone down his personality for his son or risk ruining his impending proposal.

One aspect that About My Father gets right is that it embraces what has made Maniscalco such a popular comic. His everyman persona is at the heart of all his quips and he repeatedly makes himself the butt of the jokes. The problem is the gags just aren’t funny.

I repeatedly saw the potential in the comedic set-pieces the film sets up, though. Maniscalco becomes nauseous on a helicopter, accidentally flashes his potential new in-laws, and injures people while aggressively playing tennis.

De Niro kills a beloved family pet and then does something even more outrageous with it, while he also gives Cattrall an unprompted haircut, to which she reacts furiously. The problem is About My Father never actually delivers a punchline that makes these sequences even remotely humorous, let alone fully reach their comedic potential.

You can’t even fault the casting. Maniscalco has a great dynamic with De Niro, Bibb, Cattrall, Rasche, Holm and Dier. They all have perfect comic timing, as well as the generosity and skills to set up their fellow actors for a joke. Bibb brings a spirit and energy to the film that stops it from being a complete disaster, while each of the characters are well defined and unique.

But the material in the script from Maniscalco and his co-writer Austen Earl is just too weak. As a result, About My Father feels more like an excruciatingly elongated and lacklustre sitcom episode than the modern version of Meet The Parents that it clearly wants to be.

About My Father’s only redeeming feature is that it proudly wears its heart on its sleeve. Especially when it comes to its brazen depiction of the importance of family, no matter what your politics are.

So much so that, after 89 minutes of cringing at its attempts to be amusing, the performances of De Niro, Bibb and Maniscalco do start to make an emotional impact and viewers can’t help but be slightly warmed by their relationships.

But that’s About My Father’s only redeeming feature. Even that’s not enough to recommend a film that’s so poor it’ll make you question if Hollywood even knows what comedy is any more.