It doesn’t fare well for a film when the two-minute pre-credits sequence clues you in to every single thing that’s going to happen in the next hour and thirty-eight minutes. Last Vegas opens with four friends at age ten, living in Flatbush, NY, hanging out at a soda shop with a girl their age. There’s the token black friend and the stock Jewish friend, who in this kind of film are obviously not going to be contenders for the girl’s affections. The other two are generic white kids, and the girl seems to like them both (she’s seen kissing them both on the cheek in photo booth pictures). The four make a pact to be friends forever, and then the credits roll.
Award yourself zero points (unless you’ve never seen a movie before) if you’ve already guessed that as old men, the four are still friends and yet the relationship is strained because of a love triangle with the girl in the intervening sixty years. Last Vegas is predictable, predictably so, and as a result relies heavily on the reputations of its four main actors to carry the whole thing through: Robert De Niro, Michael Douglas, Kevin Kline, and Morgan Freeman. For a certain kind of audience, it succeeds: the theater I was in, where I was the only person under eighty, had the audience already chuckling simply at the sight of the child actors who were supposed to be pint-sized versions of the actors they’d grow to become. I saw it with my dad, who’d been dying to see it for weeks, and that makes sense: it’s exactly the kind of film that’s made for dads who’ll inevitably be dying to see it.
Last Vegas is part of what’s become a genre unto itself since, oh, I’d say Grumpy Old Men in 1993: once-leading men who are now old codgers, getting together for one last adventure. This brand of comedy is not necessarily bad, because to be bad it would at least have to leave an impression. What Last Vegas is is harmless but forgettable. It’s also about as lazy as an old man sitting in an easy chair, wearing a bathrobe and eating the neighbor’s soup.
That last image happens twice (to Freeman and De Niro), exemplifying the first sign of laziness: the film goes for really, really easy stereotypes. De Niro is the widower, Freeman the feeble old man whose son dotes over him, Kline the hen-pecked sarcastic one, and Douglas the wealthy tycoon who’s dating women half his age. Another sign of laziness comes in the dialogue: people in this film are constantly calling each other “Mr. Big Shot” and “Mr. I-don’t-have-time-for-my-friends-anymore” and “Mr. All-about-me” (all direct quotes) to establish what each character’s gripe is with the other. The jokes are your garden-variety old-men-trying-to-be-young-again stuff: even a mildly amusing one (Freeman, to Douglas: “Where’d you get all that hair?” Kline: “Mostly from his ass”) can’t be left alone and has to be followed two seconds later with “Since most of your hair is from your ass, to you comb it or just wipe?”
Etc. The only truly offensive thing about the film is that it ultimately seems like little more than an audience-funded vacation for the four main actors, a weekend in Vegas to gamble and party and occasionally read some lines in front of a camera. De Niro has been phoning in performances for about a decade now, but it’s disappointing to see Freeman and Douglas opting for that too, here. Only Kline seems to be having any fun as the old guy rolling his eyes at Florida life, with lines like, “Guys, it’s 4:30 pm and I’m at a dinner party!”
But then again maybe that’s because Kline’s ten years younger than the oldest guy here (Freeman). Which frankly just outlines yet another lazy thing about the film, which is that, unlike Grumpy Old Men, which at least used Walter Matthau and Jack Lemon’s history as the original Odd Couple for its joke, the producers here chose four actors from totally different kinds of films and entirely different time periods; they bear no relation to each other except that they’re all over fifty. Actually, come to think of it, what isn’t lazy about this movie? I mean, “Last Vegas”? What did they, just go “They’re going to Las Vegas for the last time, and “las” looks like “last”?” (Why am I asking? Of course that’s what they did).
Actually, fuck this movie. The more I think about it (I saw it a week ago and haven’t thought about it until I had to write this) the more I realize what a con-job it is. It’s not even like there’s a Viagra joke: there’s a whole set piece—a whole plot line centered around Viagra. And De Niro’s faux-outrage at Douglas for not going to his wife’s funeral is just the absolute height of shitty acting. And the idiotic way it panders to its senior citizen audience when Freeman tells a younger man how to hit on a girl (“Tell her she’s beautiful, not sexy”) and then it works because hey, kids these days are so damn rude, why can’t it just be like the old days? And Mary Steenburgen being completely misused as a cocktail lounge singer who all the men fall for immediately. And Turtle from Entourage looking somehow even more punchable than he ever did on that show now that he’s lost a shitload of weight and is probably all smug to his hometown friends about how he got a free weekend in Vegas with Robert De Niro…
But now I just sound like a grumpy old man.
About Ted McLoof
Ted McLoof is a writer at Rookerville and teaches fiction at the University of Arizona. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Minnesota Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Gertrude, Monkeybicycle, Sonora Review, Hobart, DIAGRAM, The Associative Press, and elsewhere.He's recently been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and a Best of the Net Award. He is very cool and very handsome and he'd like to buy you a drink.