Old Guy should be a good film but isn’t. Thanks to someone somewhere along the line deciding to funny things up.
Not that the funny doesn’t have its moments. Take the opening scene, of an old guy with a big floppy grey moustache at a rave full of young people. Smiling ecstatically and throwing shapes, he’s caught up in the heady moshiness of it all. The camera spins. The music pumps. At a certain point the old dude clambers onto the stage to get chummy with the DJ. Only to be immediately escorted off the stage again by bouncers, though he’s punching the air in delight at having stormed the citadel.
The fact that the old guy is played by Christoph Waltz – Bond villain, Tarantino baddie extraordinaire – is what makes it properly amusing.
It turns out that Waltz is playing an ageing hitman who’s recently been out of commission because he needed an operation on his hand. But now that the brace is coming off, Danny Dolinski fully expects that he’ll be going back into the field. Instead his handlers send him to Belfast, to mentor an up-and-coming hitman, Wihlborg, something Dolinski really doesn’t want to do, especially as he suspects that the younger man is going to be his replacement.
Here, in tried and true style, the mismatched couple – drug-taking, endlessly smoking oldster Dolinski and sensible young Wihlborg, who sports painted fingernails, is teetotal and wears a pink hat – are rammed together for a comedy influenced by those buddy action comedies of yore. Shades of Nick Nolte and Eddie Murphy in 48 Hrs, Mel Gibson and Danny Glover in Lethal Weapon or, more recently, Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling, in 2016’s The Nice Guys.
This would all be very good if the comedy was sharp enough. But, beyond some cursory working of the age-and-guile-versus-reflexes-and-beauty seam, writer Greg Johnson’s heart isn’t entirely in it. Really, he seems to want to tell a rather sad story about an ageing hitman ignoring the calls to hang up his holster and eventually paying the price. There’s a meditative and rather wistful film in here somewhere, amplified by a side story about Dolinski’s control, Anata (Lucy Liu), who definitely has heard the call to get out of the business but cannot work out how to do it.
Simon West is the director and he seems to have been hired to put some Con Air crazy into it, which he duly does. Everyone plays along. There are set-piece shootouts and some assassinations full of banter and splatter. Waltz has good comic timing, while Cooper (son of Philip Seymour) Hoffman rides shotgun to Waltz in much the same way that Wihlborg does to Dolinski (ie, he’s bridling). Lucy Liu builds a character out of nothing at all as Anata.
They all want to be in the other film, though, something more akin to The American, which saw George Clooney as the hitman who has failed to heed the call and pays the price. Maybe that’s the film they signed up to be in. Those names suggest as much.
From the Saul Bass-style opening credits onwards, Old Guy suggests it’s meant to be something more than just a DVD in a supermarket aisle (appropriate 1990s reference) but that’s what it has turned out as. Good actors let down by a compromised screenplay, nuanced performances drowned out by the demands of the action movie, comedy riding over the existential despair. I enjoyed it, but then in my head I was watching the other movie.
Old Guy – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
