Review

Going in Style

Albert Gardner (Alan Arkin) makes age-appropriate small talk with Annie Santori (Ann-Margret) in Zach Braff’s remake of Going in Style.
Albert Gardner (Alan Arkin) makes age-appropriate small talk with Annie Santori (Ann-Margret) in Zach Braff’s remake of Going in Style.

The current reboot of Martin Brest's charming 1979 heist film Going in Style is what happens when producers or studio executives pay more attention to ledgers than scripts. While the talent assembled is comparable to the original movie and other projects that have scored with an older demographic (such as 2011's The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel), the low key appeal and poignancy is completely gone.

The new film does try to tug at your heartstrings. You can tell because the music by Rob Simonsen gets louder and mushier during these sequences. It's as if Simonsen is desperately trying to relieve the audience of feeling their own emotions.

Going in Style

70 Cast: Morgan Freeman, Michael Caine, Alan Arkin, Joey King, Matt Dillon, Ann-Margret, Christopher Lloyd, Peter Serafinowicz, Siobhan Fallon Hogan, John Ortiz

Director: Zach Braff

Rating: PG-13, for drug content, language and some suggestive material

Running time: 1 hour, 36 minutes

With the setup involved here, it's doubtful that George Burns, Art Carney and Lee Strasberg could have stolen viewers' hearts as easily as they did in their own movie.

Director Zach Braff (Garden State, Wish I Was Here) and screenwriter Theodore Melfi (Hidden Figures, Saint Vincent) have made at least one decent film apiece but don't seem to have any idea why their previous films worked. Since they both come from the world of independent features, maybe they thought working for a major studio required them to treat viewers as if they've had recent lobotomies or were watching the film under heavy anesthesia.

On second thought, drugs wouldn't help because they'd only make the tedium seem longer.

It's almost as if we're following the lives of Joe (Michael Caine), Willie (Morgan Freeman) and Albert (Alan Arkin) from cradle to grave in real time. Despite Braff's flashy graphics and deviations from chronological order, Going in Style never achieves any sort of peaks or valleys.

It's like being trapped in a train taking a circular path along western Kansas.

The only advantage the current movie has over its predecessor is that it features three Oscar-winning leading men instead of two (despite his legacy as a theatrical educator, Strasberg sadly went to his grave as a mere nominee).

In the first film, the trio undertook robbing a bank simply out of boredom or a whim. In this version, Melfi seems to be holding the characters and the audience at gunpoint in a heavy handed attempt to make the film feel contemporary. Hell or High Water covered the same subject matter with greater subtlety and candor.

All three lifelong friends (who curiously have wildly different accents) have had their pensions swiped as part of a fallout from a corporate merger. It also doesn't help that Joe is about to lose his home thanks to a dodgy loan policy from his bank and that Willie desperately needs a new kidney to live.

The cranky Albert's only problem seems to be dodging the affections of a perky fellow senior citizen (Ann-Margret) and teaching talentless students how to play sax. Before you can say "deus ex machina," the three team up with a fellow (John Ortiz) they term a lowlife, presumably because he's Hispanic.

The first film practically tailored the characters to the actors. There's a moving scene where Burns looks wistfully at a photo of a woman who was his real-life paramour Gracie Allen, and method acting guru Strasberg delivers a monologue that's so heartbreaking his students like Marlon Brando would be hard up to match it.

Braff and Melfi, however, stick the film with shallow, troubling attempts to make humor out of dementia. Seeing Christopher Lloyd trying in vain to play his character's memory loss for laughs makes one's side ache from indigestion instead of mirth.

Brest actually placed the heist in the middle of his film, and it gave him a way of making his story seem less routine as a result. By the time Matt Dillon shows up to interrogate the aging criminal novices, any hope of bringing the story to life is gone.

This film has been sitting on the shelf for a little while, so its release now appears to be Hollywood's version of a write-off. Perhaps Braff and Melfi can take comfort in the fact that Brest followed Going in Style with terrific films like Beverly Hills Cop, Midnight Run and Scent of a Woman.

MovieStyle on 04/07/2017

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