With movies like Last Vegas and The Expendables franchise, Hollywood is banking that as fans get older, they would like to commiserate with their more famous counterparts over the good old days and past glory while exclaiming that they haven’t lost a step. Stand Up Guys banks on your need for nostalgia and is less a movie than an homage to the actors and the genre devoted to made men. I would watch Christopher Walken and Al Pacino in anything, and I have seen them in some pretty wretched movies, but Stand Up Guys isn’t one of them.
Stand Up Guys isn’t awful, but it certainly isn’t a masterpiece. Stand Up Guys actually feels like the main characters already died, and they exist in a fantasy world where all their dreams come true, and all their issues are resolved so they can move on to the next phase. Not one single character other than the main crime boss reacts to them with anything other than a mixture of admiration and awe even when a normal person would admonish them to behave. As Stand Up Guys unfolds, the hijinks become increasingly outlandish and improbable yet believable in a dream logic way.
If the French have mastered the art of film and meditating on the realities of life, aging and death, then Americans have mastered the art of film in denial of those realities and balancing that reality with the fantasy that we are as great and worthy of adoration as we imagine that each of us is like a fine wine-perhaps a little grittier, but better with age. Stand Up Guys may be predictable and largely rest on the laurels of its outstanding cast, but it is a harmless diversion until a better movie comes along to showcase the veteran cast’s talents.