Old Dads ends with Jack Kelly patching things up with his wife and dealing with his anger issues, but how much did he actually change, or was his worldview proven true? Old Dads is a Netflix comedy written and directed by Bill Burr, featuring Burr, Bobby Cannavale, and Bokeem Woodbine in the lead roles as middle-aged dads of young kids who are struggling to fit in with millennial parents and modern culture they think is too soft and sensitive.
Jack Kelly (Bill Burr) is a 51-year-old dad with a son in kindergarten and a pregnant wife. His friend and business partner, Connor Brody (Bobby Cannavale), also has a son in kindergarten, while the third friend and business partner, Mike Richards (Bokeem Woodbine), is about to learn his girlfriend is pregnant. Having just sold their business to a millennial CEO and put their kids into a private kindergarten, Jack, Connor, and Mike struggle to cooperate with new cultural expectations, which causes trouble at work, their kids school, and with their wives.
How Did Jack, Mike, and Conner Lost Their Company And How They Got Some Back
At the beginning of Old Dads, Jack, Mike, and Connor had just sold their high-end throwback sports jersey company, Trifecta Classics, in a deal that guaranteed they’d keep their positions on the payroll, just not their ownership stakes. The new CEO, Aspen Bell (Miles Robbins), an eccentric millennial entrepreneur complete with inspirational speeches and a data-driven, focus-group-tested, social media-driven re-brand campaign. He immediately lays off all the aging staff born after 1988, although Jack, Mike, and Connor don’t make it long either after they get fired over a recording of them making insensitive jokes in private.
They’re told they’re being let go over violations of the “morality clause” in their contracts, which also means they forfeit their company stock. Mike was responsible for the legal aspects of the business, and he said the use of the morality clause was valid, but Jack’s closing monologue also reveals Mike successfully sued the company for age discrimination so they could get “some of their equity back.” While age discrimination is a separate matter from the morality clause, the fact that Aspen was certainly guilty of age discrimination for firing the staff born after 1988 is something they may have been able to leverage as evidence of bias for wrongful termination.
Did Jack Actually Learn Anything? What Made Him Change?
Bill Burr’s Jack is a hot-headed, foul-mouthed, gen Xer who lets people know exactly what he thinks of them and tells kids to “rub some dirt on it” when they get hurt. He’s an honest, hard-working dad and husband who loves his family and (mostly) treats his friends well, but he bristles at other people having opinions on how he lives his life or raises his son. Naturally, he doesn’t fit in with the millennial parents at his son’s new private school where he’s told he needs to be more culturally sensitive, think more inclusively, and check his privilege as a white man. This leads to multiple blow-ups putting his son’s academic future at risk.
Ultimately, it’s not Jack’s worldview that gets him in trouble, but his anger management. After getting kicked out of his house for blowing up at his wife in front of the other parents at the school fundraiser, he realizes he does need to go to therapy after all. His personal transformation has nothing to do with the generational or cultural issues he’s been bristling at throughout the movie, but merely his patience in dealing with others. When he’s in the Uber on the way to the hospital, he sees himself in their driver, a man who lacks patience for anything younger than him who talks about how he’s isolated from his family.
At the end of Old Dads, Jack hates all the same things he hated at the beginning of the movie (with the possible exception of scooters), but he’s learned to be more gentle and patient. In the last sceen of the movie when the bycicle rider stops to comment on how he’s being unsafe by playing catch with his son while his baby daughter is strapped to his chest, he politely thanks the man, despite him calling Jack’s parenting into question, but still calls him an “asshole” under his breath after he rides away.
Jack Benefited From All the Things He Hates
At the beginning of Old Dads, Jack rolls his eyes at Connor trying to talk about viral videos, he complains about people riding rented electric scooters down the street and not stopping at stop signs, makes fun of millennials posting videos where they flip over water bottles, and complains about insincere cancel culture, saying “I could be like you guys. Pretending to care. You guys don’t care. All you’re trying to do is not get in trouble.” Despite mocking these elements of modern culture, he depends on all those realities at the end of the movie.
When the bouncers at the casino begin beating up Jack, Mike, and Conner, Aspen begins streaming it live to TikTok to “demonstrate their use of excessive force on these poor defenseless dads” to distract the security so Jack and his friends could escape. While they’re driving to the hospital and get stuck in traffick, Jack decides to use the scooters to get around all the stop cars (and stop signs). Even Mike’s lawsuit for age discrimination could be seen as reversing the company’s use of “cancel culture” to get their equity back. It’s by no means a drastic perspective shift, but does show Jack embracing and utilizing some more modern cultural norms to his advantage.
What Old Dads’ Ending Really Means
On paper, an R-rated comedy written, directed, and headlined by Bill Burr, who’s known for making controversial jokes about culturally sensitive issues, about a gen X dad who runs intro trouble with millennial and gen Z culture sounds like it would be a lot more over the top and edgy than the actual product. Ultimately, Old Dads doesn’t explicitly condemn or embrace any particular culture or generation and instead just shows the modern struggles of people who grew up in different times and places trying to live in the same world together. Old Dads doesn’t do anything particularly offensive and fires shots fairly equally at behavioral, social, and cultural quirks of multiple generations.
Old Dads makes plenty of fun of millennials, portraying them as soft, culturally sensitive, and image-driven, but Jack and his gen X friends are hardly angels either, as their behavior is often selfish, abrasive, and insensitive as well. There’s no individual person singled out as the “normal” one, instead, it’s simply about everyone learning to get along with everyone’s differences. As Jack tells Aspen at the casino bar, “the only thing that matters in life is if you love someone and they love you. That and your kids.”
