Going in Style

Going in Style - The Filthy Critic - One FingerI’ve always imagined getting older would be shitty and way worse than getting younger, which is what my secret invention will do: make people younger. I don't want to say too much about it, though, because every time I talk about it people want to know a lot of specific technical details. Like, how big will it be? How much will it use chrono synclastic infundibulum? Does it exploit passageways to alternate dimensions? Exactly how big an idiot am I?

The answer is I am a very tiny idiot because I am close to having a working model. I just need more spoiled milk and dollar flashlights. And when my invention works I will turn all of my enemies into babies, tell them they are stupid and never change their diapers. You don’t want diaper rash? Don’t piss me off.

Plus, even if I make you a baby you’ll still have to grow old. Which means you’ll have that many more miserable years of dreading each and every day that someday you will die and nobody will ever remember you. One lifetime is enough of that for me, thank you.

Like I said, growing older is going to be shitty, but I hope to God it’s not as fucking awful as Zach Braff shows it in his remake Going in Style. What a patronizing, clueless, schmaltzy and emotionally bankrupt hunk of pissing horse dick. Apparently his idea of getting old is being an aimless, doddering fart given to humiliation in public and behavior that goes beyond senility and right into mental retardation.

Before directing this movie, Zach Braff starred on a shitty, phony sitcom full of smug winks, as though it had already decided for itself how cute it was. Then he made a shitty movie about fake emotions that is best remembered for a single song and for the legion of twenty-year-old girls with no real life experience who mistakenly thought he was saying something. He followed that up with an even shittier crowd-funded movie that all decent people could see had the sincerity and depth of a condolence card bought at a liquor store. Now he’s back with a shitty remake of a movie that didn’t need remaking. Only, he’s made it dumber, because he’s a fucking phony.

Like the original Going in Style, Braff’s version is about three old men who rob a bank. The original ain’t great, but it’s not nearly as insulting, demeaning and clueless about senior citizens. Either Braff has never actually hung around an old person, or he didn’t pay attention when he did because he’s made them uniformly doddering fools and sends his actors, Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman and Alan Arkin (all who should have turned this turd down) through a gauntlet of moronic embarrassment and humiliation. In Braff’s view, stupidity by the old is just downright cute, and all they can manage.

In the original, George Burns, Art Carney and Lee Strasberg became criminals because they were bored. They were raging against the dying light. That’s something I can get behind. Those are characters I can give a shit about. That’s as good a reason for a caper as any.

Not Braff. His old people are woken from their stupor  by some played-out horseshit about bad, bad corporations wrongfully taking their pensions. It’s the same shitty reason every other shitty bank robbery movie uses. And the fucking movie doesn’t even bother applying a twist to the premise.

Going in Style - The Filthy CriticThe old men rob not so they can feel alive but just to maintain themselves while waiting for death. They watch The Bachelor and talk to fake-ass grandkids via Skype. In other words, they live the lives a clueless shit thinks is all the elderly can manage. I would rather they rob to feel alive, to show the world they aren’t all used up, that they can outsmart the modern world, that not all old people are sweet and harmless.

Braff won’t even let the old men come up with their own plan. They enlist a younger man to teach them. What the fuck? Braff wants us to root for guys who can’t even pull of their own heist, which turns out to be so vague and devoid of thrills that it was obviously cooked up by a screenwriter and director too stupid or lazy to have an original concept. And that’s a God damn shame, because coming up with a scheme would be half the fun of making a bank robbery movie. It’s also a criteria upon which all bank robbery movies should be judged. Hell, compare this to the wonderful movie Quick Change, and it’s immediately clear how inadequate Going in Style is.

Along the way, the movie enlists Christopher Lloyd in a career cratering cameo. I thought nothing could be worse than his turn as a flamenco dancer in The Oogieloves in the Big Balloon Adventure. I was wrong. Here he hams up senility. Oh, gee, that’s hilarious when old people mutter, get confused and shout out random things. So clever! At its lowest point, Going in Style forces Arkin, Freeman and Caine to shoplift from their favorite supermarket as “practice” for robbing a bank. First, there is no way in fucking hell I will root for people so stupid they think this is good practice. Second, Braff’s idea of humor is for his doddering old farts to be so stupid they stuff bags of flour, a five pound tin of ham and pork loins down their pants, and then try to escape on a Rascal scooter with Freeman sitting in the basket. So many stupid choices, so little to root for. And so much humiliation for once distinguished actors. Do you know a single old person this stupid?

There is nothing subtle, nothing smart and nothing genuine about Going in Style. I believe Braff has the unenviable dual talents of being incompetent and underestimating audiences. He thinks we’re stupid, that we are easily engaged by fake personalities and  we can’t handle complexity. Or, he is and can’t, but his movies feel far more like patronizing twaddle. Even the twists in this movie are mild, unsurprising and pointless. That the younger man who teaches the old men turns out to be a bank robber who once showed one of them kindness is not a revelation, significant or touching.

Going in Style is a sad reminder that the worse thing about getting old is not aging, it’s the way people like Zach Braff will think of you. Get ready to be treated like a fucking baby. If I have my way, my enemies will be treated that way twice. Braff, you’ll be first to get an illuminated blast of curdled low fat.  One Finger.