Breaking and entering

No, I don't fully agree.

I can see what you're saying, so that's why I say don't 'fully' agree, because I can see how witing him becoming violent against her husband would have been appropriate given the B&E scene, but I think the B&E scene made him a more three dimentional figure.

We don't know a persons backstory. Perhaps he was in a situation (he's 70 after all) where he didn't do something similar which had massive repercussions.

We just don't know. The scene fitted. I felt it did anyway :)

I agree. I was actually about to post the exact same thread.

How did he go from being the perfect gentleman who shaves every day, even when he's not going out, and always wears a suit and tie and tucks his shirt in, and carries a handkerchief in case he should meet a lady who needs one...... To a guy that breaks into a woman's house to delete her files and possibly steal her laptop.

As a father figure it was more in line with his character to sit her down and say look, we all make mistakes, you should own up to it and apologize.

To top it off, the scene had no relevance to the plot of the movie. They could have just deleted the whole thing, along with the whole wrong email subplot, and everything would have been just as fine.

Because if anyone asked, he had the key and was doing her daughter a favour. In fact, was doing the mother a favour, in a way, saving her from seeing that thing.

It was a bit off, but was funny, especially the dopey guy miming the rap with the doors locked. Idiot.

This scene is as funny as it was intended to be, in my honest opinion. From pulling up to the house and assigning an Ocean's Eleven actor, to Adam Devine's character rapping in the car while the others try to get his attention. I love it. That being said, I wouldn't disagree with the notion of it feeling out of place... yet at the same time it doesn't completely feel like it was written in simply for laughs to me.

At this point in the movie, we've seen how much De Niro's character cares about Hathaway's character, and personally i don't find it hard to accept that he was willing to do something that was out of character for him by trying to help her get out of whatever dilemma she was in. So since he knew who's house it was they were going to "break" into and the reason behind it, along with there being a zero chance he was going to harm someone had he gotten caught, I would say the scene isn't really that unconvincing.

And no, it wouldn't have made sense for this polite and possibly first time law-breaking senior, to give her husband a Casino type beating because he committed a non-violent, rather petty crime.

For me, it felt like the old-school guy solution to the problem, so not too out of place for the character

The way I see it in both cases he was protecting her interests.
1) She asked for help and he came up with a solution to protect her from an embarrassing situation.
2) In the case of the husband, he stayed out of it because that was the proper thing to do. If he confronted the husband or had told her about it then he's setting himself up for a confrontation where he would probably lose and worse chance losing the respect she had for him (He had no way of knowing she had already figured it out).