Robert Duvall starring in a movie does not automatically make it good. A Night in Old Mexico is a dreadful movie. An elderly man is moving from his family ranch to a trailer park when he meets his grandson for the first time. He was estranged from his son. He decides to take off for one last adventure, gets more than he bargained for, but shows everyone that the old guy still has it. Basically it is the old guy being naughty trope, and I’m supposed to find him less annoying because he is going to die instead of more annoying because he has learned nothing after all this time.
A Night in Old Mexico is like a Hallmark movie except without the values. Duvall gets to teach his grandson some valuable lessons about being a man, and somehow gets a happy ending. The whole enterprise is gross because apparently being a man is going to stereotype Mexico for whoring, drinking and fighting drug dealers for their money. Sure he only dances with women, and the woman that he ends up with is a hot chick who is not a whore and wants to take care of him (like a daughter?), but still no. The theme of what makes a man a real cowboy should just be an advertisement for toxic masculinity. Just causing a ruckus to show that you are still alive is not living if you are not having fun, and the whole affair is perfunctory and joyless. He is just an asshole who never took responsibility for his actions and got angry when he finally had to pay the consequences. The potential for violent reprisals are fairly real so any possibility that I would find his antics humorous evaporated quickly.
Duvall must have enjoyed working with Angie Cepeda and Jim Parrack, who was in the supporting cast of True Blood because Duvall hired them to be in a film that he subsequently directed and starred in, Wild Horses. Parrack does a better job in Duvall’s film. Cepeda is so good that I almost rewatched her sections because her dialogue seemed like it came from another movie. How is your character drawing all these nice conclusions about these two? They seem just as bad as the other guys except they are actually worst because when you are with them, you are in physical danger. What are you doing? They must have been so excited to get a big break and have an opportunity to work with a legend…in a crap movie.
Especially huge Duvall fans should skip A Night in Old Mexico. You have to have some real screwed up ideas of what is fun, what Mexico is like and how to be a man to think that this dreck is worth your time. Without knowing any (I think), even double-crossing drug dealers and criminals are horrified by the film. A Night in Old Mexico is trying to exploit the nostalgia of viewers like Stand Up Guys who have grown older alongside their favorite stars, but don’t want them to change. Unfortunately this film forgot what actually made us love these stars in the first place.