Going in Style (2017)

Going in Style (2017)

IMDB Rating : 6.8/10 (as on 14.04.2017)

PG-13 | 1h 36min | Comedy, Crime

 Desperate to pay the bills and come through for their loved ones, three lifelong pals risk it all by embarking on a daring bid to knock off the very bank that absconded with their money.

Director: Zach Braff

Writers: Theodore Melfi (screenplay), Edward Cannon (based on the 1979 story by)

Stars: Joey King, Ann-Margret, Morgan Freeman

IMDB link Here

In a remake of a 1979 comedy, Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman and Alan Arkin play struggling retirees who turn to larceny.  

It revolves around a bank heist, but the real crime in Going in Style is its waste of acting talent. Updating the premise of a nearly 40-year-old film, screenwriter Theodore Melfi and director Zach Braff, in his third stint at the feature helm, drum up a wan comedy about a trio of former factory workers who take matters into their own hands after their pensions go up in smoke. Though the effortless charm and goodwill of topliners Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman and especially Alan Arkin keep things watchable, that’s not enough to redeem the clunky mix of broad-strokes comedy and perfunctory social commentary (including an allusion to Sean Spicer, perhaps tagged on late in production).

Trading dry humor and pathos for sitcom beats and sentimentality, this adaptation of Martin Brest’s 1979 film (based on a short story by Edward Cannon and starring George Burns, Art Carney and Lee Strasberg) turns a quiet, character-driven piece into a run-of-the-mill collection of high jinks, oldster style. The cast is certain to be a draw as the film goes head-to-head against the Smurfs’ latest big-screen adventure, though in this case live action is no guarantee of more dimension.

Braff and Melfi (Hidden Figures) favor the adorable over the trenchant, and so the nods to brutal economic realities and electoral rage give way to one “ain’t those codgers something” bit after another. (And a key plot point hinges, without the slightest believability, on an exceptionally adorable little girl, played by Annabelle Chow.) The sweet comic slant might not be a problem if the bits were funnier or had zing, but under Braff’s utilitarian direction, most of the comedy is strained and flat. He and cinematographer Rodney Charters inject some much-needed visual pizazz with a few montage-y split-screen sequences.

An early scene on a New York park bench is the most overt reference to the earlier film, although it’s unfortunately “enlivened” by Christopher Lloyd’s dementia shtick, which becomes a running joke of sorts. No one in the supporting cast fares particularly well, although Kenan Thompson, as a supermarket manager, has a way with some of the screenplay’s better quips, and gets in and out unscathed. Matt Dillon scowls and talks tough as an FBI agent, while Joey King has little to do in the role of Joe’s 14-year-old granddaughter, and the wonderful Maria Dizzia is utterly wasted as his daughter.

Arkin notably escapes the twinkly routine that substitutes for substance in Caine and Freeman’s roles. He’s also the only convincing blue-collar New Yorker in the bunch. If anyone’s going in style, it’s Arkin’s Al, who snarls and kvetches with elegant directness, and whose talents include cooking and jazz saxophone. He also hooks up with the fetching supermarket employee Annie (Ann-Margret) who’s been coming on to him. Though the screenplay’s idea of flirtatious badinage is Annie cooing over a package of chicken that “breasts are better than thighs,” it’s a kick to see Ann-Margret and Arkin side by side.

Significantly, Al, the movie’s most rounded character, isn’t saddled with paper-deep family subplots, as are his partners in crime — story threads that are as superficial as most of the proceedings, and as obvious as Rob Simonsen’s button-pushing score.

Directing his first major studio comedy, Braff creates a few bursts of brightness, and allows the occasional darker moment to play out without rushing for a punchline, as when the men calculate how many more years they expect to live. His affection for the three leads is evident. But far more is going on in their gazes and body language than in the tired movie surrounding them.

Read full review at Hollywood Reporter

Going in Style’ Proves Crime Has No Age Limit

NEIL GENZLINGER

Call it the old-dudes-acting-up genre. It’s always good for a pleasant, nontaxing romp, and that’s precisely what the caper film “Going in Style” delivers.

It’s a remake of a 1979 movie that starred three big names on the back end of their careers, George Burns, Art Carney and Lee Strasberg. The new version matches that star power with Michael Caine, Alan Arkin and Morgan Freeman, working amusingly together as retirees who find themselves in need of money or excitement or both and decide to rob a bank.

These types of films always take pains to point out that gray hair and wrinkles don’t equal comatose — before the story is through, pot has been smoked, vigorous sex has been enjoyed, and the gents have done an almost perfect job of outsmarting the detective (Matt Dillon) who is investigating the robbery. On the other hand, Christopher Lloyd turns up as a wild-eyed eccentric who embodies an awful lot of senior-citizen stereotypes.

Anyway, the director, Zach Braff, better known as that actor from “Scrubs,” keeps things moving briskly and surrounds the leads with a well-chosen supporting cast that includes Ann-Margret, John Ortiz and Kenan Thompson. It’s strictly comfort food, 99 percent predictable, though the 1 percent that isn’t — you’ll know it when you see it — is deftly executed.

Read full review at New york times

Movie Rating ★✬☆☆☆  

 It is a cliche-ridden exercise

Shalini Langer

Banks which cheat, systems which don’t care for the poor, jobs which are being shipped overseas, elderly who pine for families, and a friend who has kept a fatal ailment hidden. There are so many cliches running through Going In Style that it is a miracle it got actors such as Caine, Freeman and Arkin to play along. It is a pity too, for Zach Braff of Scrubs fame fails to even build among them a chemistry to last.

A remake of a 1979 film by the same name, Going In Style can’t even lay claim to the original idea of three elderly men, on their last legs and pennies, planning a bank heist. But even if it had stuck to that central premise and what goes on before and after that robbery, Braff could have had a winner. Instead, a long prelude leads up to that 3-minute robbery, and a hasty conclusion follows to wrap it up.

You may surmise that a bank heist won’t prove easy for three men in their condition and age, but the film has other ideas. Incidentally, the original knew better than to fall to that temptation.

Eventually, the only part of Going In Style that really works — proving what it could have pulled off with actors of this calibre at its disposal — is the attempted trial theft by them at a convenience store. It ends with two of them being caught by a security woman on foot, as they try to get away on a battery-operated basket. Now we are talking.

Read full review at Indian express

Movie Rating ★★✬☆☆  

Morgan Freeman, Michael Caine, Alan Arkin steal show

Michael Phillips

A pleasant hangout session for its stars, and those who love them, the remake of the bittersweet 1979 comedy "Going in Style" cheers things up for early 21st-century audiences and allows its Golden Boys ensemble a measure of dignity alongside the slapstick, pathos and wish fulfillment. If that sounds like a qualified endorsement, you're reading me loud and clear.

Director Zach Braff, best known for "Scrubs," works from a script by Theodore Melfi ("St. Vincent," "Hidden Figures"). With their approximately $45,000 annual steel mill pensions frozen and presumed lost, owing to manufacturing moving to Vietnam, retirees Joe (Michael Caine), Willie (Morgan Freeman) and Al (Alan Arkin) are saddled with money problems in the extreme. (Millions may watch "Going in Style" and, at least for a moment, think: Must be nice to have a pension to lose.) During a testy meeting with his local loan officer about an imminent home foreclosure, Joe witnesses a deft, bloodless bank robbery and gets an idea. Why not go gangster himself and pull off his own heist, with the help of his pals?

I hadn't seen writer-director Martin Brest's original "Going in Style" since it came out nearly 40 years ago, and a revisit was frankly astonishing. Brest had the sense, the taste and the temperament to allow George Burns, Art Carney and Lee Strasberg to play their scenes, many of them achingly sad, at a relaxed tempo. There's hardly any rim-shot humor or concessions to perceived audience taste circa '79.

Braff's remake is a lot pushier, and more determinedly ingratiating. Arkin gets the most from the material, simply by not falling prey to the obvious rhythms in Melfi's screenplay. Too often the movie ignores what it has right in the foreground, in its favor. There's an Arkin/Ann-Margret duet on "Hallelujah I Love Her So" that gets lost in a chaotically edited action sequence, for example. Braff's approach is the bigger-equals-funnier mode, and while that mode has its commercial upside, the downside is a delightful hambone such as Lloyd working 200 percent harder than needed.

The same cannot be said of the stars. Caine, Freeman and Arkin redeem a lot of the movie, and interesting faces keep turning up, such as Matt Dillon (as a dumb/smart hybrid of an FBI agent), Joey King (as Joe's granddaughter) and Maria Dizzia (too-briefly seen as Joe's daughter). Freeman is now 79; Arkin, 83; Caine, 84. Collectively these performers have learned more about what works with an audience, and how to serve a character, than can be measured. "Going in Style" stays in the safe zone every second, nervous about risking any audience discomfort, as opposed to Brest's quietly nervy ode to old age and its discontents. Times change. If Braff's film is a hit, it'll be because the three headliners have more or less refused to change with them.

 Read   full review at Chicago Tribune

Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman go nowhere in this benignly boring comedy  

Robbie Collin

“Talent hits a target no-one else can hit, genius hits a target no-one else can see,” Schopenhauer once wrote. Going in Style hits a target no-one else would bother with. The new Zach Braff film remakes a bumptious and Borscht-y Martin Brest caper from 1979, in which three retired rascals decide to knock over a bank, just for something to do. Its big mistake is presuming the original team’s relatively underpowered motive was a misstep, rather than the whole fun point.

With Caine, Freeman and Arkin, you know what you’re going to get. In Going in Style, it’s all you get. Caine’s slowly-cracking emotional voice comes out for its bi-annual airing – but while in recent work by Christopher Nolan and Paolo Sorrentino this most familiar of tics still packed a breath-catching punch, under Braff it feels like a party trick. Ditto Freeman’s wry twinkling and Arkin’s cantankerous blather, both of which are exhausted before the end of the trio’s dry-run robbery of a local mini-supermarket, let alone the heist itself.

Even the mere existence of that protracted and fantastically unfunny sequence is hard to fathom. If they’re just hard up, why make such a big deal of it? (It ends in a mobility scooter chase, because of course it does.) But if they’re just practicing, what on earth does surreptitiously sliding tinned meats into your jacket have to do with holding up a bank teller at gunpoint? So much of the film feels like this: inconsequential, ill-thought-through and begging to be trimmed.

Ann-Margret and Christopher Lloyd play Arkin’s love interest and a social-club eccentric respectively – but while both characters are welcome sideshows, you don’t exactly thirst for more of them. Ditto Peter Serafinowicz, who plays the absent father of Caine’s granddaughter in a mostly un-comic reconciliation subplot which dwindles to a dangling afterthought. Late on, one disgraceful bait-and-switch momentarily cons you into thinking the characters might have a last-minute opportunity to grow or change a bit – until the camera zooms out to reveal that no, they won’t.

Braff is still probably best known as the lead in the none-more-noughties hospital sitcom Scrubs: film-wise, we last heard from him in his 2014 comedy-of-misfits Wish I Was Here, whose irksomeness started at the non-subjunctive title and just flew from there. This new one’s too benign to be as bad, but it’s the Cheshire Cat of ingratiating feel-good fodder, fading even as you watch it, leaving nothing but a simper. No style, no go.

Read full review at Telegraph

Movie Rating ★★☆☆☆   

Kate Muir

Going in Style might be better titled Going off the Boil as the talents of three great actors — Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman and Alan Arkin — are lazily squandered in a rehash of a pensioners’ bank heist story first made in 1979.

In this latest version, Joe (Caine), Al (Arkin) and Willie (Freeman) have just lost their pensions when their former employer moves operations from New York State to Vietnam, and Joe is about to lose his house as his Williamsburg bank forecloses.

Unwilling to give up their slice of the pie, the seventysomethings decide to rob the very bank that is mopping up their retirement money, and set about learning criminality from a local “low-life” professional: after all, they have nothing to lose but their freedom, and at least prison means three square meals a day.

The three Oscar-winning actors are basically Skype-ing in their performances here, delivering lines thick with cliché and thin on wit. It’s a perfectly jolly jape, but you’ve seen it all many times before.

Read full review at The Times