It’s a little hard to tell if Old Guy, a new thriller comedy about, well, an old guy who is also a hitman, is somehow an intentional parody of your Liam Neeson-driven subgenre of aging actors in action movies. If it is that, it’s not a very good one — there’s little room for uncertainty in parodies. If, on the other hand, it’s playing itself relatively straight, then Old Guy is at least able to register as an adequate offering. In this case, the titular old guy is Danny (Christoph Waltz), a still quite competent but past-his-prime contract killer. As the film opens, Danny is on a bit of a break due to an injured wrist, and while he waits for the cast to come off, he’s away partying it up, hitting the nightclubs, picking up girls, and so forth.
But hitman duty eventually calls. And while Danny’s excited to get back into the field, his bosses aren’t so eager, deciding instead to saddle him with training up a new recruit: the brash, disrespectful, and unseasoned Wihlborg (Cooper Hoffman). Do you think these two mismatched menaces will eventually come to mutual respect and maybe even friendship? Well, anything is possible.
Predictable though this all may be, it’s never awful — but neither is it ever particularly good. Waltz is playing a vaguely crusty, seen-it-all expert doing a bit of a Columbo act to make sure nobody sees him coming, and viewers even casually versed in the actor’s screen charm should be able to imagine just how satisfyingly that goes down. He also has good rapport with Hoffman, who, as in Licorice Pizza, is extremely good here at projecting confidence and stupidity simultaneously. Lucy Liu turns up too, as the pair’s handler/cohort, who has her own agenda — hoping to reunite with a former lover while they’re all on this mission.
Old Guy is directed by the semi-legendary Simon West, who first blew up in the ’90s with big budget projects like Con Air and The General’s Daughter, but who has spent the last decade and change toiling away more in the low-budget action space. Old Guy is low-key enough in design that it doesn’t really require his bombast, but he seems to be having a good time letting his actors take the lead, and when the violence kicks off, he generally engineers it with a sure hand. And it only helps the overall aesthetic and production design that Old Guy was shot on location in Northern Ireland. Still, this is the sort of thing has to be executed extremely well to work at all, both because it’s easy to screw up and because the whole subgenre has become a bit stale at this point. As it happens, Old Guy isn’t executed extremely well, and it does remain a bit stale, but the performances are at least sufficiently dialed in to keep things pleasantly light enough for a painless, one-and-done watch.
DIRECTOR: Simon West; CAST: Christoph Waltz, Lucy Liu, Cooper Hoffman, Ann Akin; DISTRIBUTOR: The Avenue; IN THEATERS: February 21; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 33 min.
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