Alan Arkin, Morgan Freeman, and Michael Caine (Atsushi Nishijima/Warner Bros.)
Three seasoned veterans star in director Zach Braff’s remake of the 1979 comedy Going in Style. Ann-Margaret even makes an appearance. What’s not to love? The script, for starters.
Screenwriter Theodore Melfi (who wrote and directed Hidden Figures) makes sure you know the plight of the elderly. From the movie’s first scene, Joe (Michael Caine) is spoken to condescendingly by the staff at his neighborhood bank. The chairs in the bank’s lounge are too low for his aging body to navigate comfortably. Worse than this physical indignity, he’s caught in the kind of predatory banking cycle that made Hell or High Water one of last year’s most compelling and relevant films. While he’s waiting, Joe witnesses a bank robbery, and that inspires him to recruit his friends to rob the same bank.
The plot strains for elderly empowerment, but there’s something about the movie that feels spoon-fed, like so much Hollywood product.
A look at director Martin Brest’s original shows how much more respect he had for his elders. Unlike his 2017 counterpart, Joe (George Burns) doesn’t need to see a bank heist to be inspired. He gets the idea on his own. Brest didn’t hammer home a disrespect for the elderly; he simply treated them with respect, showing them not as cute old codgers (although they do stop to dance to a steel drum band in the park).
The current cast acquits themselves well, especially Alan Arkin as Albert, a one-time jazz player. The most natural of the trio, Arkin maintains his dignity even when he resorts to riding the basket of a motorized scooter driven by Willie (Morgan Freeman). But the filmmakers seem to assume that by the end of the film, viewers over a certain age will not recognize a key line used earlier in the film.
It’s great to see Caine, Freeman, and Arkin together, and they have decent chemistry, but this remake seems like a lost opportunity to make something that really resonates with their changing bodies and the changing city—there’s only passing reference to the gentrification of New York.
There was lots of potential for resonance here, but the film doesn’t hit the marks of a seemingly glitzier product like Last Vegas, which also starred Freeman. That film used modern comedy tropes and the dazzle of a changing Las Vegas to say something meaningful about the passage of time. Thanks to its distinguished leads, Going in Style is watchable, but it doesn’t give you a real sense of the rich lives its characters once led. The only time it marks is the 96 minutes it takes to watch it.
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Going in Style
Directed by Zach Braff
Written by Theodore Melfi, based on the 1979 story by Edward Cannon
With Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman, Alan Arkin, Ann-Margret, Christopher Lloyd.
Rated PG-13 for drug content, language and some suggestive material
96 minutes
Opens today at local theaters.
