Last Vegas
[kkstarratings]
Director: Jon Turteltaub
Cast: Morgan Freeman, Robert De Niro, Michael Douglas, Kevin Kline
Length: 105 minutes
Country: USA
The promotion of Jon Turteltaub’s comedy Last Vegas promises raucousness and subversive images of old men behaving badly. In reality, this 12A-certificate attempt to repackage The Hangover for older male audiences offers no such excitement. Not even the decent performances of its experienced leading actors (Morgan Freeman, Robert De Niro, Michael Douglas and Kevin Kline) can save the film from its objectionable sense of humour: the only way this film can be unreservedly enjoyed is if you have something of a taste for soft, outdated gags that hinge lazily upon the degradation of women or the elderly. The bizarrely offensive scene in which the main characters judge a wet t-shirt contest manages the achievement of thoroughly degrading both.
The four leads are neither objectionable in a comedic, ironic way nor gentlemanly enough to be truly likeable. They do nothing that surprises us or subverts our expectations of them, nor do they charm us with their restraint. As Morgan Freeman and Kevin Kline skulk the strip, the juxtaposition between their grandpa dress sense and the blaring of Rizzle Kicks that soundtracks their venture is nowhere near as funny as it’s asking us to find it. There is a sense of desperation in the obviousness of such ‘comedy’. The lacklustre script attempts to squeeze every last laugh it can out of the idea that old people are ignorant and uncool; that Kline’s character’s acknowledgment of 50 Cent as one of the Jackson 5 was considered enough of a highlight to include in the film’s trailer tells us much about the short supply of inventive wit on offer throughout. Although the acting performances show great experience of counterfeit emotional display, ultimately no level of trained fakery can give these sloppily developed, clichéd characters any real pathos. This is a shallow and trite film that relies largely upon wooden gags and evokes the bare minimum of empathy. The only performance of any heart is that of Mary Steenburgen as a nightclub singer, but even her warmer turn cannot rescue this vapid succession of toilet humour riffs and ludicrously accessible women from unintelligent distastefulness.
Turteltaub shows us a world of kitsch glitz, predatory pensioners and easy young women
Not only is the distastefulness of this movie is baffling, but it is also made even more annoying by the measures of restraint applied in order to meet its paradoxically family-friendly age certificate. If Turteltaub had ramped up the outrageousness and worked his actors harder to be daring, this film might have engaged me more. Perhaps if the bikini-clad girls of the Vegas strip had recoiled at the sight of four sleazy old miscreants rather than salivated over them, my disdain might have been directed at the four main characters rather than at the film as a whole; a similar effect could have been achieved to that of Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers, but unlike that feature, Last Vegas lacks any sort of interesting aesthetic premise and uses scenes of hedonism to reinforce well-worn stereotypes rather than to invert them.
The film is disappointingly flat and timid. Its four, fine actors limp as convincingly as possible through a bland series of clichéd events that serve only as agitprop for the illusory glamour and possibility of Las Vegas. Turteltaub shows us a world of kitsch glitz, predatory pensioners and easy young women that none of us will ever live in, and that most of us would rather never live in. Its impression of Vegas tells us nothing that the already saturated lineage of Vegas comedies hasn’t already told us, and I find the career moves of Morgan Freeman and Robert De Niro to get increasingly misjudged with every grey hair. Unless your local cinema offers some kind of unorthodox refunds service, gamble your money on Last Vegas at your own peril.
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