They don’t make them like Danny Dolinski anymore. As played with characteristic off-kilter charisma by Christoph Waltz, the aging contract killer at the center of Old Guy swaggers around in a vintage leather jacket, exchanges playfully cutting banter with his criminal associates, and sports a shaggy coiffure. That all prompts a disappointing indicator of this crime-comedy’s joke-telling ability: “The ’90s called: They want your haircut back.” In short: Dolinski is another era’s idea of cool, something that’s made abundantly clear when he’s assigned to train the overzealous upstart (Cooper Hoffman) who could take his place as London’s top hired gun. And once our homicidal odd couple picks up a third wheel played by Lucy Liu, Old Guy starts to feel like a bygone era’s idea of a cool movie, the sort of thing Quentin Tarantino or Steven Soderbergh would’ve populated with underworld smart alecks and crate-digging needle drops when Dolinski was at his peak. And I say this as someone of the age to have a sense of nostalgia for such things. This just doesn’t land.
The throwback vibes are subtle, but the exploration of aging is not: Just as Old Guy director Simon West has fewer opportunities to pull out his old Con Air flash these days, Dolinski is frustrated by his employer’s lowered expectations and a bum shooting hand. That seems like it should be enough for a diverting-but-unmemorable caper, but this one unfortunately crams in a whole buddy-movie arc and a halfhearted romance, too. And even then, it needs to pad out a plot involving an ill-fated trip to Belfast and a hostile mob takeover to get across the 90-minute mark.
There are times when Old Guy mimics the rope-a-dope tactics of its protagonist, its outward doddering giving way to a level of surprise and impact it doesn’t seem capable of – a target’s relative pulled out of the line of fire with a little How the Grinch Stole Christmas routine, or a briefly pulse-elevating car chase. But scenes like these are exceptions; so many others are driven by characters and relationships, and those are dragged down by Dolinski’s failure to convincingly or meaningfully click with Hoffman’s Wihlborg or Liu’s Anata. (You have to hand it to screenwriter Greg Johnson: His script may not be particularly novel or memorable, but the character names sure are.)
At least Old Guy has a firm grasp on its actual old guy. Much of that credit goes to Waltz, who’s in his element – and sporting an immaculate mustache – as the underestimated charmer talking his way through sticky situations. There’s a lot of work put in to earn our sympathy for him, which makes sense given his line of work: He’s a professional murderer, but he’s a professional murderer in a vulnerable state, recovering from surgery and threatened by the presence of young gun Wihlborg. In one of Old Guy’s few moments of filmmaking panache, West breaks the slow-motion, party-hearty euphoria of Dolinski’s post-work drinks, drugs, and dancing routine to show us what he looks like from an outsider’s perspective. As Wihlborg approaches his reluctant partner in a bar, what we see is a rhythmless boob dancing with women half his age. It’s a funny image, but it’s also a little sad. But the script keeps such emotions in reserve, turning them off and on with a plot-centric inconsistency that’s also applied to Dolinski’s supposedly debilitating injury. Sometimes he’s hobbled, sometimes he’s an action hero, and it makes no sense.
But Old Guy just can’t settle for being a decent character study of a GOAT in decline. In the scenes between hit men, I heard a yearning for (and, in the case of Waltz, the voice of) the downtime banter of Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, and Jackie Brown. The love story in the midst of all this aspires to the fireworks of the George Clooney-Jennifer Lopez scenes in Out of Sight, but only gives off a few sparks – the chemistry just isn’t there between Waltz and Liu or their characters.
Old Guy is at least aware enough of its limitations to keep its action sequences sensible, showing Dolinski’s particular set of skills through on-the-fly ingenuity rather than any superhuman gun-fu. It doesn’t make for the most thrilling shootouts, and his deadly accuracy eventually robs any standoff of its suspense, but it is amusing to see him take out multiple adversaries at once by applying his skills with munitions in the kitchen.
The generational warfare, meanwhile, has all the depth and heat of a newspaper op-ed about millennials’ financially ruinous appetite for avocado toast. Dolinski debates whether Wihlborg is a member of that touchy-feely cohort, or if his strident teetotaling and hypebeast fashions mark him as a member of Gen Z – a quasi-quip that only emphasizes Old Guy’s sweaty uncertainty about its wunderkind assassin. It’s possible that the hardline stances he spouts are signs of someone who’s not sure who he is, either, but for all of the sincerity Hoffman lends to his character’s unearned convictions, Wihlborg never really comes into focus. It’s fitting, then, that our first glimpse of his killer instincts takes place in the fuzzed-out background of a close-up on Waltz.
Pity poor Lucy Liu, stranded in an extraneous subplot that’s only there to deliver her character – one who runs a karaoke joint and into Dolinski’s arms. Around the midway point, Old Guy bafflingly mucks with its own momentum by cutting between Dolinski and Wihlborg’s most trying job and Anata’s date with a nice doctor. What could possibly be going on here that’s as important as the high-stakes hit on one of their rival organization’s top men? Whatever the reason, it speaks to the amount of filler bulking up the story because it has precious little to say. The dancefloor interludes really pile up across this hour-and-a-half, though none are as flagrantly drawn out as Dolinski and Wihlborg’s arrival at their handler’s dog-track HQ, where they pause to watch a hairy metaphor for their relationship do a slo-mo lap through the dirt.
There’s no real tension here, just inevitability: When Dolinski instructs an injured colleague to look at a picture postcard of a tropical paradise, a clock ought to pop up onscreen, counting down to the shot of that mope’s blood splattering across the postcard because there’s no subversion of cliche to be found here. Uneasy alliances will be struck, fragile trusts will be betrayed, and the full range of our main hitman’s righteous fury will be uncorked.
It’s certainly not impossible for these previously loved puzzle pieces to be taken out from the box and arranged in such a way that they can still come together into something cohesive. But here it’s hard to get too invested in the outcome, or what happens to any of these characters, when most of their interactions are stitched together from hermetically framed shots that seal Waltz, Hoffman, and Liu off from one another. It’s just one more facet of Old Guy that makes this ensemble piece feel like several parallel one-man shows.
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