"The Old Man & The Gun" Review: A Nice Curtain Call For Redford
We’re at the curtain call for one of the greatest actors of his generation. After entertaining us for close to sixty years, Robert Redford announced that The Old Man & the Gun would be his final film role. The new film from director David Lowery, who previously directed Redford in 2016’s Pete’s Dragon and last year’s A Ghost Story (which was one of my favorite films of last year), Old Man is a breezy film, in a good way. Never taking itself seriously, it’s nice to see a film set out and do what it’s trying to do: to simply entertain us and have fun with the material on hand. Even though Redford claims this is his final role, this shows that he still has plenty of gas left in the tank should he decide to “un-retire.”
Based on a mostly true story, as the opening title card tells us, Forrest Tucker (Redford) is a seasoned bank robber who’s been in and out of trouble since the age of thirteen and successfully escaped prison sixteen times. Forrest, even though he’s a criminal, is a proper gentleman and always polite. His latest string of bank robberies along with his accomplices Teddy (Danny Glover) and Waller (Tom Waits), whom the media dubs the Over the Hill Gang, catches the attention of local cop John Hunt (Casey Affleck) who’s hot on their trail. Along the way, Forrest develops a relationship with a widower, Jewel (Sissy Spacek), as he and his team plan for one last big heist.
For what he’s calling his final film performance, Redford absolutely delivers as Forrest, a man who just can’t help himself and loves what he does. Watching him charm up the screen and playing it cool shows why he’s considered one of the best of his time. For the story at hand, written by Lowery and based on a 2003 New Yorker article from David Grann, I enjoyed the depths Redford brought to Forrest. He presents himself as a polite, charming gentleman, but beneath the façade, there’s a sort of loneliness to him. I believe no one else could have pulled it off as great as Redford does. The chemistry that Redford exhibits with everyone, from his accomplices to Jewel to even John, was great. In fact, the storyline between Forrest and Jewel was one of the strongest parts of the film, and for these actors to finally be in a film together, you would have been fooled to think they’ve done this song and dance plenty of times. Lowery also presents Forrest and John as the yin and yang to each other. While Forrest is happy to be doing crimes in the prime of his life, John seems like he’s burnt out from being a policeman. All of the other actors were solid in their roles as well.
With each of the films that he has directed, Lowery has shown a certain growth with the ability to navigate through different genres while still giving each film a style and personality of its own. The jazzy soundtrack from Lowery’s musical collaborator, Daniel Hart, helps move the film along and feels appropriate for the film. The look of the film that Lowery and his DP Joe Anderson went for, with shooting on 16mm and then blowing it up, helps to make the film look like something that took place in the late 70s/early 80s. The montage sequences, particularly showing Forrest robbing banks or how he escaped prison so many times, are spot on and have a certain energy to them. The length of the film, at 93 minutes, was perfect to get in and out, so it never overstays its welcome.
Even though it’s breezy fun, it doesn’t go too in-depth. Since Lowery, at times, feels like he’s focusing more on Forrest, the supporting characters aren’t developed very well. Some of them come and go without any real significance to the story. It would have been fun if there were just a few more scenes with either Glover or Waits’ characters, and to see more interactions with John’s wife Maureen (Tika Sumpter).
Overall, for his final performance, you couldn’t ask for anything more from Redford. This is his film through and through. In this time and age, it’s refreshing to go to a film and just have fun for a couple of hours. The Old Man & the Gun delivers on that front. If this indeed is the end of the road for him, he picked a good film to go out on. And I’m looking forward to whatever Lowery has coming up next. I would recommend checking this film out whenever it comes to your theater.
Rating: B+
Movie Review: The Curious Case of "Proud Mary"
Proud Mary is a sequel to a movie we never saw. It expects us to have a certain level of knowledge about its’ characters that could only be known by having met them before. Writers John Stuart Newman, Christian Swegal, and Steve Antin expect us to care and buy into their script in a way that they don’t earn nor attempt to construct. Yet since we’ve never seen the prequel to this film, we’re left with the work of three clearly inexperienced writers (check their imdb creds) whose rushed script was passed through the Screen Gems studio hierarchy and green-lit without a thorough analyzation of the work. A vehicle for female protagonists like this doesn’t come along very often, especially for African American women. We deserved better than a hooptie.
Taraji P. Henson is Mary, a hit woman working for an organized crime family in Boston led by Benny (Danny Glover) and his eagerly “waiting in the wings for the throne” son Tom (Billy Brown). After sparing a kid named Danny (Jahi Di’Allo Winston) from a hit she clearly should have done more research on, we find her keeping tabs on the boy one year later out of the immense guilt of leaving him orphaned. Poor Danny is now a runner for Uncle (Xander Berkeley). He’s physically and verbally abused by Uncle and struggling to find food. So Mary takes Danny in but is sure to omit the small detail of killing his father.
Out of her love for Danny, Mary decides to defend him by confronting Uncle. When this results in Uncle’s death, the white crime family (last names aren’t given) wants blood and the black crime family has to serve someone to them in order not to start a war. If I stopped here and said that Mary serves up someone in her stead to covers her tracks and has to keep the lie going, this would be the premise for a good violence begets violence and covering a lie with a lie never ends well type of film. Instead, we get the one last kill to get out of the game completely storyline, which mushrooms into a kill everyone to get out story. In fact, the entire film feels like a convergence of different crime tale stereotypes we’ve seen before to get to the closing credits. It even boasts of dialogue like “Wake up! He was never gonna let you out!” or “if it weren’t for this family you’d still be a guttersnipe”.
The chemistry in the relationships within the film is lacking or forced. The driving relationship between Mary and Danny has sparks of realness mixed with moments of on-screen mothering that would make Madea proud. There’s a strong theme of the one time romance between Mary and Tom, but even those scenes that bring up their past love are cringeworthy. Everywhere you turn, there’s no escaping the underwritten and underdeveloped characters that have to hit certain beats to make this film a 90-minute feature.
Director Babak Najafi understands how to structure an action sequence. Don’t let this film fool you. He’s done it on the larger $60,000,000 London Has Fallen. Yet, in this film, he can’t quite figure out how to set up his shots in such a way that we can have a frame of reference for our space and location within the action scenes. Cliched shots of Mary with a gun in both hands firing every direction in a stairwell, sliding on her knees and shooting down human targets, or firing out of the window of a bullet-ridden car are all there! We’re just missing the proper orientation of how it all visually works together.
Outside of the terrible screenplay, direction, and editing, the film was executive produced by Henson herself. I’ve seen her elevate a screenplay with her talent alone in a film like From The Rough, but here it’s not enough. Which leads me to point at the elephant in the room. Are black female action leads so uncommon in Hollywood that a film like Proud Mary can get green-lit with hacks for writers, a director who is asleep at the wheel and an attached Academy Award Nominated African-American star in the producer chair who closes her eyes to the flaws in order to get the film made? What am I missing? Female action stars are rare, and black female action stars are unicorns. So why wasn’t more care taken in making this film? Why not create an iconic character that we’ll want to see again? I can only come up with desperation to fill a gap and see a character like this on the big screen.
If numbers don’t lie, then the fact that Proud Mary has virtually made it’s budget of $14,000,000 back in under two weeks since its release and the fact that it was narrowly beaten out by The Commuter (which had double its budget and Liam “particular set of box office skills” Neeson starring in it) in its’ opening weekend says a lot. To me, it says that there is a market out there for this type of film with people ready to support it. The film didn’t get a huge marketing push like last year’s Atomic Blonde or the upcoming Tomb Raider. So the duckets were earned on this one. Yet, it goes back to the age-old debate and double-edged sword of backing a film like Proud Mary with your dollars. Do you do it to tell the industry we want to see action films like this with a black female lead or withhold your hard earned cash to say we demand better?
I backed the film with my money even though I was hearing bad things on social media channels because I want to see minority women as action stars on the big screen. I sat through the film on the edge of my seat, not because of the white-knuckle action, but because I couldn’t wait to get out of there. But I showed up and gave the film a fair shot. What you do is up to you, but our daughters, wives, and mothers deserve to see more representation of themselves on the big screen as action stars that are better than this! Perhaps it will take a Patty Jenkins-esque scenario in which the powers that be empower a female director who actually cares about the story to take the reins. Maybe Taraji should handle the screenplay, producing and direction next time. Maybe. Whatever it is, Proud Mary is the poster child of what not to do in the future and it saddens me to say that!
Rating: F