Going In Style

This is one of those, "old guys try to commit crimes" movies. Not unlike Stand-Up Guys that I reviewed back in June, or any number of other movies. What's a little different about this one is, the old guys are not long-time criminals who have tried to go straight and decided it isn't for them, or who just got released from prison after however many decades.

Instead, Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman, and Alan Arkin are retired steel mill workers who learn they're being screwed out of their remaining pensions by the company that bought out the company they worked for. On top of that, their pensions are being used to pay off the company's debts, through the bank all three of them use, which is in the process of foreclosing on Caine's house after they jacked up his mortgage rate.

So Michael Caine gets the idea to rob the bank. Which leads to the funniest part of the movie, when Caine and Freeman decide to do a trial run by stealing the ingredients to make chicken cordon bleu from the local grocery store. Watching Michael Caine try to quietly stuff a bag of flour under his shirt, or Morgan Freeman jam an entire pork loin down his pants is just hilarious, as is their attempted getaway.

It's not nearly as funny after that, once they recognize the need to consult a professional on how to rob places, but there are still some amusing parts. Christopher Lloyd's involved in several of them, but mostly how they arrange their alibis for the robbery. There's one interesting surprise near the end I enjoyed, and a very brief fakeout at the end I thought for a minute was going to cast a real pall over the film. Like they didn't want it to be too clean of an ending. But it was a designed fakeout, so whatever.

The bit where Michael tries to get his former son-in-law to actually try to be a decent father feels a little tacked on. I think I get the reasoning. Make us to feel like these guys are actually taking the possibility of failure and prison seriously, even if they're joking about prison healthcare being better than what they currently have. So Michael Caine is trying to make sure there's someone there to help his daughter and granddaughter. I don't know that it entirely works, but it doesn't drag the movie down too much.