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Going in Style review: Zach Braff's one-note comedy relies on veterans' charisma

Jake Wilson

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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.

★½
(M) 96 minutes

If you've been to the movies, a comedy about a gang of oldsters who beat the system by robbing a bank is something you've probably seen before. But then originality is not the purpose of Going in Style, the kind of old-fashioned entertainment that gives old-fashioned entertainment a bad name.

This is a remake of a caper from 1979 that starred George Burns and was directed by Martin Brest, who would go on to crowd-pleasers such as Beverly Hills Cop. The director here is Zach Braff, who has a crowd-pleaser of his own to boast of – the 2004 indie romantic comedy Garden State, which he wrote and directed – but remains best-known as the mopey protagonist of the medical sitcom Scrubs.

Braff doesn't appear on camera here, but it's not hard to connect the dots between his fatuous screen presence and the film's puppyish eagerness to please. The stars are Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman and Alan Arkin as (respectively) Joe, Willie and Al, who once worked alongside each other in a Brooklyn steel mill and now swap affectionate insults in retirement.

The movie has a populist side, which at a stretch you could call political. With the steel mill moving to Vietnam, the heroes face losing their crucial pensions; Joe also has a grudge against his local bank, which threatens to foreclose on the house he shares with his daughter (Maria Dizzia) and granddaughter (Joey King). Thus he has little to lose by turning to a life of crime, though it takes forever for him to persuade his buddies to join him.

For a 96-minute movie, Going in Style has a lot of time to kill – time which could have been spent exploring the characters, if there were any. Alas, screenwriter Theodore Melfi (Hidden Figures) opts to pad out proceedings with feeble wisecracks rather than trying to deepen the drama, rarely even allowing the central trio to reminisce as longtime friends surely would.

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Indeed, beyond a few somewhat arbitrary details such as making Al a jazz musician, the film doesn't seem to know the first thing about these guys – why the London-accented Joe moved to New York, what he and his friends bonded over, why all three wound up single in old age.

To fill in the gaps, Braff relies on the long-established star personae of his leading men, who perform exactly as you'd expect. Caine speaks in a plonking downright manner, with meaningful pauses in the middle of sentences. Freeman is laid back and wisely amused, Arkin a curmudgeon who proves to be a softie at heart.

The supporting players have even less to work with: Christopher Lloyd as a wild-eyed coot, or Ann-Margret as a sexpot whose function is to show that Al and Willie, who have lived together for decades, aren't a gay couple. Much of the dialogue is corny and clumsy to the point of embarrassment, reaching its nadir in the scene where Joe orders his no-good former son-in-law (Peter Serafinowicz to straighten up and be a man.

Braff's technique adds little. He and cinematographer Rodney Charters shoot for a cosy look that's all warm brownish tones and diffused light, as if the aim were not to show the physical signs of ageing too starkly. There are flourishes such as the retro use of split screen, but most scenes are staged in an unfussy way that suggests that the main goal was to document the performances.

While in theory the film insists there's life in these old dogs yet, in practice it tells us the opposite, that ageing is a matter of going through the same routines with diminishing effect.

The depressing thing is that this need not be true, at least for actors who still have some juice left in them. Consider the 80-year-old Alan Alda's transformative turn as a vicious patriarch in Louis C.K.'s recent web series Horace and Pete – not altogether a random example, given how much C.K. has to say about ageing, masculinity, and the changing face of working-class Brooklyn.

By contrast, Braff and Melfi can't even bring themselves to make the expected jokes about hipsters, though they do have Joe's granddaughter explain that the streets have become safer thanks to gentrification.