Redford saunters into the sunset
The Old Man & the Gun 12A cert, 93 min Dir David Lowery Starring Robert Redford, Casey Affleck, Sissy Spacek, Danny Glover, Tom Waits, Tika Sumpter
The Old Man & the Gun starts as it means to continue, with the now-82-year-old Robert Redford sauntering into a small-town bank, having a few quiet words with a teller, and walking out smiling, with a briefcase bulging with cash and a gun he has barely needed to flash to get the loot.
This is rumoured to be Redford’s swansong role, and whether that’s true or not it certainly plays like a summation of sorts. He has spent much of his career – from Sundance Kid to Sneakers – charming his way out of trouble with that megawatt smile, being gentlemanly with a gun to hand.
The Old Man & the Gun is content (maybe a little too content) to saunter along with him, plugging in to that unflappable Redford star wattage and wanting us to thank it for the memories. It’s so squarely the Redford show that the fact he’s playing Forrest Tucker, a real-life career criminal, is curiously by-the-by.
First imprisoned at age 15, the incorrigible Tucker claimed to have successfully escaped 18 times, which gives the director, A Ghost Story’s David Lowery, the chance for a flourish: he recreates all 18 of those moments in a flicker-quick montage, even folding in an archive clip of Redford as the jailbird in Arthur Penn’s getaway drama The Chase (1966). It’s a fun sequence, with a snap and swagger which is generally missing from the rest of the film.
What inner darkness might Tucker have nurtured? None, the film shruggingly decides, making its assignment for Redford breezy but shallow. There are more demons festering away inside Casey Affleck as a beleaguered cop called John Hunt, who becomes obsessed with getting Tucker back behind bars. He is to Redford here what Tom Hanks was to Leonardo Dicaprio in Catch Me if You Can, if you can get your head around that dizzying generational switch.
Affleck does a lot of weary exhaling in shirtsleeves, filling Hunt with his customary sense of failure and shame, after the witty set piece which first brings him into Tucker’s orbit: he’s literally in the same bank, distracted by playing with his son, when a hold-up happens that’s so laid-back he doesn’t even clock it. Cut together with casual cool, this is one of the few sequences that generates some low-key tension: the next time Tucker comes anywhere near being caught, the soundtrack defaults to an old country ballad, as if to check out entirely on any genre suspense duties.
Danny Glover and Tom Waits, as Tucker’s accomplices, essentially fight for scraps, though Waits wins with a cherishable Waitsian dive-bar soliloquy about his reason for hating Christmas. Elisabeth Moss has one scene as the long-lost daughter Tucker didn’t even know he had, and Keith Carradine’s credit shows up for longer on screen than Keith Carradine does.
The warmest and best element of this undemandingly languid film is Sissy Spacek, playing a widow called Jewel whom Tucker chivalrously assists when her car breaks down. She plays along with his bank-robber shtick without entirely knowing whether to believe it, and a last-daysof-autumn romance blooms.
One wooing trick he tries, in a spirit of risk and adventure, is to walk her out of a jewellery store with an unpaidfor bracelet on her wrist. Watching her respond to this mischief, stop in her tracks, and decide if it’s too late to turn back, you remember how gently Spacek can steal whole sequences of her own. All eyes are meant to be on Tucker and Redford, but let yours stray her way, with a hint of rebellion, and the film’s twinkly nostalgia trip gets a little more touching.