Hey, anybody want an “old guys rob banks” movie that’s sort of like Last Vegas meets The Crew, The Bucket List, About Schmidt, Mad Money, and Dirty Grandpa? Plus, to sweeten the deal, it’s directed by Zach Braff, the auteur behind Wish I Was Here? That sound good to anyone? If so, Warner Bros. has a brand new trailer for a comedy called Going In Style, scheduled for release in the U.S. and U.K on April 7, 2017. The two-and-a-half-minute promo is actually something of a minor miracle, since there’s not one nanosecond of it that feels remotely spontaneous. It’s fashioned entirely from recycled material, right down to the use of “Highway To Hell” by AC/DC on the soundtrack.
Michael Caine plays Joe, a man who finds himself unfairly denied his pension and decides to retaliate by robbing a bank to get it back. Alan Arkin and Morgan Freeman are his curmudgeonly accomplices. Ann-Margret turns up, seemingly to do what she did in Grumpy Old Men, and Kenan Thompson is just adorably exasperated. Freeman, at one point, is coerced into saying, “You think?” And when Caine is asked whether he’s “five-o,” he responds: “We’re practically eight-o.”
Part of the familiarity is built-in, to be fair, since this is a remake of a semi-obscure 1979 Martin Brest film starring George Burns, Art Carney, and Lee Strasberg. Of that film, The Cleveland Press declared: “The talent of the three actors is wasted. It’s the only talent in sight in a movie poorly written, sloppily directed, and badly edited.” The late Gene Siskel, however, was much more positive in his appraisal, comparing the film favorably to The Electric Horseman and Kramer Vs. Kramer. “This is old age accurately observed,” Siskel wrote, “and that turns out to be most dramatic and entertaining.” The remake, incidentally, features Arkin cutely struggling to use an iPhone.