Dir: Zach Braff; Starring: Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman, Alan Arkin, Ann-Margret, Christopher Lloyd. 12A cert, 96 mins.
“Talent hits a target no-one else can hit, genius hits a target no-one else can see,” Schopenhauer once wrote. Going in Style hits a target no-one else would bother with. The new Zach Braff film remakes a bumptious and Borscht-y Martin Brest caper from 1979, in which three retired rascals decide to knock over a bank, just for something to do. Its big mistake is presuming the original team’s relatively underpowered motive was a misstep, rather than the whole fun point.
As such, enter Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman, both rheumy of eye and wistful of cadence, plus Alan Arkin with the mordancy cranked to max. They play Joe, Willie and Albert, three retired steelworkers whose pension pots have vanished in a shady corporate restructure, just as Joe (Caine)’s so-called ‘teaser’ mortgage has been winched to an unpayable rate.
Vowing revenge on both their former employers and the bank – conflated by Theodore Melfi’s script into two sides of the same corporate elite coin – the men decide to steal back what they’re owed, and not a penny more. If they get away with it, they can enjoy retirement as planned: if not, they’ll live out their days in a comfortable prison, with three meals a day plus “better healthcare than we have out here,” as one of them drily notes. It’s a nice line – a few do turn up – but when a film builds a scenario in which its characters believe nothing’s at stake, why on earth would its audience ever think otherwise?
With Caine, Freeman and Arkin, you know what you’re going to get. In Going in Style, it’s all you get. Caine’s slowly-cracking emotional voice comes out for its bi-annual airing – but while in recent work by Christopher Nolan and Paolo Sorrentino this most familiar of tics still packed a breath-catching punch, under Braff it feels like a party trick. Ditto Freeman’s wry twinkling and Arkin’s cantankerous blather, both of which are exhausted before the end of the trio’s dry-run robbery of a local mini-supermarket, let alone the heist itself.
Even the mere existence of that protracted and fantastically unfunny sequence is hard to fathom. If they’re just hard up, why make such a big deal of it? (It ends in a mobility scooter chase, because of course it does.) But if they’re just practicing, what on earth does surreptitiously sliding tinned meats into your jacket have to do with holding up a bank teller at gunpoint? So much of the film feels like this: inconsequential, ill-thought-through and begging to be trimmed.
Ann-Margret and Christopher Lloyd play Arkin’s love interest and a social-club eccentric respectively – but while both characters are welcome sideshows, you don’t exactly thirst for more of them. Ditto Peter Serafinowicz, who plays the absent father of Caine’s granddaughter in a mostly un-comic reconciliation subplot which dwindles to a dangling afterthought. Late on, one disgraceful bait-and-switch momentarily cons you into thinking the characters might have a last-minute opportunity to grow or change a bit – until the camera zooms out to reveal that no, they won’t.
Braff is still probably best known as the lead in the none-more-noughties hospital sitcom Scrubs: film-wise, we last heard from him in his 2014 comedy-of-misfits Wish I Was Here, whose irksomeness started at the non-subjunctive title and just flew from there. This new one’s too benign to be as bad, but it’s the Cheshire Cat of ingratiating feel-good fodder, fading even as you watch it, leaving nothing but a simper. No style, no go.
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