‘Going’ cast gets robbed
A serious waste of a great cast, the comedy heist “Going in Style” is a remake of a 1979 Martin Brest (“Meet Joe Black”) film of the same name, featuring Art Carney, George Burns and Lee Strasberg as three retired New Yorkers who decide to rob a bank.
This new version, helmed by actor-director Zach Braff (“Garden State”), co-stars Michael Caine, Alan Arkin and Morgan Freeman as the would-be desperados and falls decidedly flat in spite of a new screenplay by the currently hot Theodore Melfi, director of the Academy Award-nominated hit “Hidden Figures.”
Set in Brooklyn and Queens, this new “Going in Style” is the story of Willie (Freeman), a widower who only gets to see his beloved granddaughter and daughter once a year because of meager finances; his roommate and fellow retiree Al (Alan Arkin), who also plays saxophone; and Joe (Michael Caine), another widowed ex-steel worker, who shares his small home with his single-mom daughter (Siobhan Fallon Hogan) and his generically smart-talking granddaughter Brooklyn (Joey King). Joe’s relationship with Brooklyn is close because her father (Peter Serafinowicz), a legalized pot dealer, has not been a part of her life. Joe’s too-cute scenes with Brooklyn are only one example of how the film feels phony and prefab. The screenplay has been rejiggered to accommodate current economic realities such as the outsourcing of American manufacturing and the dismantling of pensions.
Joe is at the local Williamsburg Bank discussing his home’s foreclosure with a weasely banker (Josh Pais) when it is robbed by professionals who do not hurt anybody. That inspires him to recruit his buddies, irascible Al and Willie, who is in dire need of a new kidney, to rob the bank after being coached by a pet shop owner/professional thief named Jesus (John Ortiz).
Christopher Lloyd is completely wasted as the guys’ senile lodge buddy Milton. Matt Dillon fares better as a dogged FBI agent. Best of all in a supporting role is Kenan Thompson as a neighborhood market’s manager.
In a subplot, Al has a flirtation-turned-romance with market worker Annie (AnnMargret), whose grandson Ezra (Jeremy Shinder) is a terrible music student of his.
Among bits in this film that are too broadly directed and notably unfunny is one in which the three men shoplift at Annie’s market. Instead of Groucho masks, the men dress up as Rat Packers for their bank robbery. Freeman, Caine and Arkin cannot do much with this material. Caine is far better in the noncomic, R-rated 2009 release “Harry Brown,” playing a similarly angry old man who takes matters into his own hands.
(“Going in Style” contains profanity, drug use and suggestive elderly sex.)