While Last Vegas has been sold as a geriatric spin on The Hangover, in truth, it’s closer in kin to The World’s End. It’s much more about trying to recapture past glory than it is about having debauched Vegas shenanigans. Here, Vegas is presented as a vanilla Disney World with slot machines and no cartoon characters rather than than the mythical haven of the Hangover flicks. But whereas The World’s End rebuffed its characters’ desire to “stay young,” Last Vegas affirms it, and as a result it fails to be anything more than a painlessly bland outing. Also, it just isn’t funny.
Billy (Michael Douglas), Paddy (Robert De Niro), Archie (Morgan Freeman), and Sam (Kevin Kline) are septuagenarians who have been friends since grade school. The rich, Malibu-dwelling Billy paints himself with spray tan and pretends he isn’t so old. The recently-widowed Paddy stews in his misery in Brooklyn. Sam lives a loveless, listless marriage in Florida. Archie has stifled under the worried eye of his son since having a stroke. When Billy spontaneously decides to marry his young girlfriend, the quartet reunite in Vegas for a bachelor party weekend preceding the wedding. Archie wants to have a good time, Sam wants to get laid, Paddy doesn’t want to be there, and Billy isn’t sure what he wants. With the help of lounge singer Diana (Mary Steenburgen) though, they might just be able to have a good time. And learn late-in-life lessons, of course.
If you were to make a list of every weary elderly-related joke you could think of, chances are that this movie would hit most if not all of them. Viagra, Medicare, hemorrhoids, lack of pop cultural awareness, bad hips, and many more canards are name-checked. The horse is long dead, the beating is finished. Last Vegas is kicking at a bottle of glue, then getting its foot stuck and tripping. Sometimes, it’s not clear what the joke is even supposed to be. One sequence has the main characters serving as judges in a bikini contest. There is little conflict or incident. They dole out scores to the women’s bodies. At one point, a member of LMFAO thrusts his thong-clad groin in Robert De Niro’s face. All are having a good time. There’s nothing humorous about it.
This is a film that seeks to assuage the anxieties of the AARP crowd. “Your age is no impediment to fun,” it croons, and to that end, there’s little standing in the characters’ way. Early on, Archie wins over a hundred thousand dollars at a casino, and the group spends the rest of the weekend in a Lucullan penthouse suite, hosting parties at their leisure, displacing 50 Cent himself from his reservation. They’re living a dream, interrupted only occasionally by old resentments between Paddy and Billy springing back up, but even those get smoothed over with relative ease.
Mercifully, the actors are not degrading themselves here — they only stoop as low as mere slumming. Their rapport is good, and they genuinely feel like old friends. Their interaction makes the film endurable, and each actor even manages to hit a good emotional beat once in a while. De Niro, for example, can pull a bereaved, faraway expression with impressive ease. Their chemistry makes me wish that they’d been brought together for something with even an ounce of ambition.
4 thoughts on “‘Last Vegas’ Is As Old and Tired As Its Characters”
A guy from LMAFO in a thong thrusting his crotch at de Niro. If I had directed that scene, I would’ve had de Niro pull a gun and shot that fucker’s crotch and then kill the fucking group. There’s your fucking movie.
Thank god I’m not the only person who thought this and The World’s End are two similar movies. At least that movie had four middle aged guys preparing for an upending apocalypse.
The difference is whenever Last Vegas acknowledges the heavy nature of its premise, it brushes it aside rapidly and then moves on to allegedly fun shenanigans.
This movie was on cable recently and I just couldn’t get into it. I wouldn’t say the actors were slumming it so much as phoning it in. Grumpy Old Men did it better, and so did the Bucket List. Whatever.