Redford steals hearts and more in ‘Gun’
There are many reasons to get all nostalgic about “The Old Man & the Gun,” foremost among them that Robert Redford declared this would be his last film before retirement. Well, it isn’t anymore. He has walked back his retirement announcement (hooray), and it turns out that while the film has its pleasures, this “mostly true” account of real-life serial bank robber Forrest Tucker (not to be confused with the B-movie actor and star of “F Troop”) is a weak effort buoyed by an absolutely first-rate cast.
The action starts in 1981 Texas, where an old man (Redford) in a natty blue suit, brown shoes and a fake mustache robs a bank by showing a female clerk a gun in a holster and races off in a muscle car. Tucker listens to the police band using a earpiece and a radio. He and a pretty, older woman named Jewel (a terrific Sissy Spacek) meet cute when he gives her a lift after her truck breaks down. She owns three horses she loves and a failing farm she also loves. Let’s never mind for a moment that by engaging in armed robbery, Tucker endangers the lives of innocent men, women and children.
He’s Clyde without Bonnie (for now). To the tune of intrusive music, Tucker’s first robbery takes place while an unknowing young police officer named John Hunt (Casey Affleck) is in the bank with his kids. John is humiliated and becomes obsessed with catching Tucker and his similarly superannuated occasional accomplices Teddy (Danny Glover) and Waller (Tom Waits), who rob banks all across the Southwest. The whole thing heads toward one final big score involving an armored car, safety deposit boxes and a big bank. It’s “Ocean’s 11 minus 8” meets “Zodiac.”
Director David Lowery is known for “Ain’t Them Bodies Saints” and “A Ghost Story,” which both featured Affleck. I am not a fan. Lowery is currently prepping yet another version of “Peter Pan,” in this case a live-action remake of the 1953 Disney animated film.
Redford is a great enough actor to give Tucker a twinkle in his eye, make you like him enormously and help the audience feel comfortable that he will not let anyone get hurt. Spacek is so good and so appealing you wish the film were about an old couple falling in love without the bank holdups.
Glover and Waits are almost completely wasted, stuck with characters who are left completely undeveloped by co-scripters Lowery and New Yorker staff writer David Grann (“The Lost City of Z”). John David Washington, who is so charismatic in “BlacKkKlansman,” is almost invisible as John’s fellow cop. I guess nobody could make the line, “Laugh it off, Colombo,” work.
We see clips of old Westerns to remind us that these robbers are just old, out of work cowboys. Tucker’s escapes from many prisons becomes a subtext. To dramatize one of his first escapes, we see a clip of Redford’s performance in “The Chase” (1966). What, no “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid”? I wish.