DON’T MESS WITH GRANDMA (which played Fantastic Fest as SUNSET SUPERMAN, written in a better font) is a new Tubi original from writer/director Jason Krawczyk. I’ve kept an eye out for him since I saw his great Henry Rollins horror/crime/comedy HE NEVER DIED (2015), but I probly would’ve watched this anyway because it stars Michael Jai White.

It’s also figuratively made for Tubi – a modest, agreeable time that fuses the MJW action persona with the MJW comedy chops. I suppose you could also say that of BLACK DYNAMITE, but this does it in a different way. White plays JT, a Kosovo-era army ranger who has left that life far behind. He works as a driver for a Meals On Wheels type service called Trusted Trays, and regularly makes a 2 hour drive out to the boonies to take care of his “Granna” (Jackie Richardson, MAXIMUM RISK). Today he’s going up there to fix her sink and maybe, if he can get up the nerve, try to convince her to make his life a whole lot easier by moving into assisted living closer to him.

His ex-military past is visually signified by his American flag t-shirt, his muscles, maybe his knee brace. But he also has kind of a mohawk. He’s a quirky dude. He starts the movie arguing with a goose and calling him an asshole. He often talks to himself, loves fantasy audio books and rum, hates his grandma’s dog Rufus, who he treats kind of like an older brother or cousin who’s always putting him in headlocks. (Their relationship will improve after going through a hardship together.) We will find that he has a talent for violence, including but not limited to marksmanship and throwing people out windows, but his natural state is a harmless teddy bear. He seems to somewhat buy into Granna’s perception that he’s a slacker fuck up, even though his whole life is dedicated to helping the elderly, and her in particular.

One example of how he goes above and beyond in his service to her is that during this visit home invaders in creepy pig masks break in (try to mess with Grandma) and he fights them off. Not wanting to upset her, I guess, he spends the whole movie hiding from her that she’s in danger and that he and Rufus are engaged in a prolonged battle with trespassers in and around the house. When he captures an attacker named Carl (Miles Faber, various bit dancing parts and three Christmas romcoms) he ends up playing along and awkwardly having not-very-good soup with JT and Granna.

JT is trying to be a good person, so he’s always thinking out loud about whether fighting back counts as murder, and finds himself awkwardly singing to a goon as he dies in the bath tub (his throat ripped out by the dog). It seems like he’s just trying to figure out what a good person is supposed to do when someone’s dying, and settles on that.

Maybe skip this paragraph if you’re spoiler sensitive, but the central joke of the movie is that it sets up a tense action-thriller scenario but blithely undermines every element of it until it becomes a laid back comedy. We assume these are dangerous forces who will stop at nothing to obtain something valuable inside the house. Instead they’re mostly a bunch of idiots trying to steal copper pipes and a taxidermied bear. The scary mastermind character is just Stan (Billy Zane, THE PHANTOMch), a scrapyard owner with a goofy mustache and Fargo accent who is cruel but wimpy. There’s a part with a giant credited as “Most Menacing McDougal” (Rob Archer, Krampus from A CHRISTMAS HORROR STORY) but the one really skilled henchperson is a butch ex-Marine named Pam (Ess Hoedlmoser, TERROR TRAIN 2) and when she actually knows how to fight JT thinks she’s really cool and seems to get a crush on her. At one point she attacks him from behind and when he sees her face he says, “Oh, it’s you!”

It mostly doesn’t feel like there’s much of a threat, because from the beginning JT is picking them up and throwing them at each other, but that’s a deliberate choice that achieves a pleasing comedic tone. That said, I would personally find it funnier if the invaders all played it very straight; instead there’s quite a bit of frantic wackiness in their voices as they panic and bicker. But I enjoy the randomness of the topics they end up sniping at each other about, from the definition of defenestrated to whether or not goats can be sluts. A goon named Kim (Emily Alatalo, SPARE PARTS, ALL HALLOW’S EVE 2, at least five Christmas romcoms) seems to be a big Facebook user – she decides she sees signs that JT is a satanist. She thinks he’s evil even while he’s concerned about them escaping into the woods during tick season.

Here’s another (spoiler) example of how it playfully undermines the thriller tropes. In the opening it’s set up that his friend Trent (Brandon Knox, SCARY STORIES TO TELL IN THE DARK) will be coming to meet him later, so I assumed there’d be a thing like you’d usually have where JT gets into trouble and there’s tension about when help will arrive. Instead JT never really has any need for back up, and Trent shows up just as he’s chasing them off. JT says he’ll explain what’s going on later, like it’s no big deal.

The stunt coordinator is Tig Fong (What We Do In the Shadows), the composer is James Ellercamp, and I will mention music supervisor Jonathan Finegold, because he uses retro soul/funk stuff like Budos Band and Ruby Velle & the Soulphonics, so his tastes seem to be up my alley.

This is a slight and low-key comedy, and it doesn’t all work for me, but if you enjoy humorous MJW as much as I do I think it will be worth your 81 minutes. He gets to spend much of it alone talking to a dog and it’s almost entirely built around juxtaposing the appearance of a deadly killing machine with the personality of a an unambitious sweetheart goofball. He’s always kind of exasperated with the situations he’s in but overrules his negativity to be nice to the old people in his life or the jerks who are trying to (in Carl’s words) burgle his grandmother’s house. I don’t know if it would work with a different person in the role – this just happens to be the best actor to get in a dog’s face and say, “If anybody else other than me comes in here you fucking decimate them with extreme prejudice. You copy?” Or to repeatedly try to give the dog a drunken fist bump. You can’t help but like the guy, and then he has a nice talk with Granna and you feel like you made the right call. He’s contributing to the world in better ways than being a warrior. Although that also may have helped in this situation.