Old Guy Review: Still Some Gas in the Tank

Simon West’s Old Guy is a low-energy affair that benefits from the presence of a great cast and some funny moments.

It’s not an offensive production, mind you, but it does end up being a rather tedious and unoriginal experience that remains watchable mostly thanks to the work of its standout cast. Had the movie included less compelling stars, we might have ended up with something considerably worse.

Which is surprising, considering Old Guy is directed by action movie expert Simon West (of Con-Air, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider and The General’s Daughter fame). Even though his filmography isn’t necessarily stellar, most of the films he’s directed at least manage to be reasonably exciting, his better fare even being worth a hearty recommendation (I’ve always been and always will be a fan of Con-Air). With Old Guy, though, he is let down by Greg Johnson’s script, which never manages to be particularly exciting, particularly funny, or particularly original. There is nothing in Old Guy we haven’t seen before, which turns the movie into an experience as generic as its title.

Waltz plays semi-retired hitman Danny Dolinski, who after injuring his right hand has been managing a safe house in London for his bosses at The Company. He wants to go back to working in the field, but his superior, Opal (Ann Akinjirin) wants to get new blood. Thus, he asks him to train assassin wunderkind Wihlborg (Cooper Hoffman), who apparently is very good at his job but has a tendency to kill innocent bystanders whenever he’s sent on a mission.

Together, they go to Northern Ireland to kill the top members of a competing crime syndicate, which will also allow Danny to teach Wihlborg a couple of valuable lessons. There, they meet an old friend of Danny’s, fixer Anata (Lucy Liu), who ends up helping them in their mission. Because once their first hit ends up being trickier than they expected, they start being chased by both their enemies and a secret traitor. This predictably forces Danny and Wihlborg to work together, even though they couldn’t be any more different.

At its core, Old Guy tries to be a “buddy cop” movie with criminals instead of cops. Danny is the old, experimented hitman who thinks he knows everything, and Wihlborg is the young, troubled new recruit who doesn’t want to learn anything from his “master”. It’s a tale as old as time (or at least as old as movies like 48 Hours or Lethal Weapon), which means something like Old Guy should bring something new to the table in order to feel fresh and exciting. Unfortunately, the film doesn’t do anything like that, making use of tired tropes and predictable dialogue in order to make its plot advance.

Thank God, then, for Christoph Waltz and Cooper Hoffman, two immensely watchable actors who manage to inject some life into their flat characters. Waltz plays Danny in a very relatable fashion, turning him into a three-dimensional human being despite being quite archetypical on paper. He knows he’s old and knows he can’t work as well as before, but nevertheless helps his new partner, while also trying to show he “still has some fuel in the tank”. For his part, Hoffman avoids stereotypes related to “cool, young people”, emphasising the differences in perspective between his character and Waltz’s, but also trying to find some humanity in the role. The only other standout is Lucy Liu, who unfortunately has a rather thankless role that doesn’t take advantage of her talents.

Old Guy is supposed to be a comedy-thriller, but despite the cast’s best efforts, it doesn’t end up being particularly funny or thrilling. The banter between the main trio is okay at best, and most of the action sequences consist of rather brief shootouts. The one car chase we get is also very short, and it’s only by the end that we see Waltz’s Danny demonstrating why he was once considered “the best”. Taking into account director Simon West’s previous adrenaline-fuelled actioners (even something like Lara Croft: Tomb Raider at least cannot be considered boring!), I can’t avoid thinking that maybe he took the main character’s age (and thus the movie’s title) by heart, and ended up crafting a movie that’s too laid-back and low-energy for its own good.

Nevertheless, there are things to like in Old Guy. Apart from the cast, who all do their best to make things more interesting, the cinematography is quite good, taking advantage of the film’s real-life locations in the UK and Ireland. And there are a couple of interesting themes related to the passage of time, the replacement of an old generation by the new, and the existence of romance between older people. Predictably, though, these are all treated very superficially, with both Johnson and West favouring plot over theme. Old Guy is the kind of movie one can watch while doing the laundry or ironing clothes, and sometimes, that’s the most we can expect nowadays from such a talented cast and crew.

Old Guy will be released in US theatres and on digital platforms on February 21, 2024.