It’s Nicolas Cage’s turn to have a go with the very particular set of skills, in The Retirement Plan, a gonzo action comedy that’ll be familiar if you’ve seen any of the Liam Neeson outings as an all-action seeker of payback, or any of the Keanu Reeves’s incarnations as John Wick.
That, apparently, was writer/director Tim Brown’s original idea – imagine John Wick finally, eventually, retired, 20 years older and living on a sunny island and being called back into action by some untoward event.
The event that does it here isn’t the killing of a pet dog but the arrival on the Cayman Islands, where Matt Robbins (Cage) has been retired for a long time, of Matt’s estranged granddaughter Sarah (Thalia Campbell), followed by his estranged daughter (Ashley Greene), followed by a slew of elaborately unpleasant bad guys in search of a missing USB stick, on which something is secreted… “James Bond shit,” as someone puts it later on. No further explanation necessary.
What no one knows, but Brown’s screenplay starts to reveal early on, is that this old, grey-haired, white-bearded beach bum in a loud Hawaiian shirt, whose name might also be Jim Benton, is in fact some deadly ex-operative who should not be tangled with under any circumstances. Audiences might notice that Cage, nudging 60 when this was made, appears to be remarkably lithe and fit. He looks the part.
It’s funny, fast moving, and Brown goes at it in the Guy Ritchie-homages-Tarantino style of the kitsch action movies of the 1990s. The ripped goons riding an elevator in silence while kitsch Muzak tinkles away – that sort of thing. Cage is particularly good, deploying his “cartoon acting” persona and making lines funnier than they were on the page. His early interactions with Campbell, as his smart-kid granddaughter, are both funny and cute. She’s good. You can see Cage’s mouth twitch here and there when she’s caught him off guard with some remark. Later, when Sarah gets kidnapped by Othello-quoting bad guy Bobo, Ron Perlman gets the same treatment from Campbell and looks similarly delighted.
Fanning outwards and upwards there’s Jackie Earle Haley as a demented superbad gang boss, Grace Byers as an even more demented and cold-blooded super-superbad bigger gang boss. And, because this obviously has to go all the way to Washington DC, Lynn Whitfield as Matt’s old control, and Joel David Moore as her right-hand man. One of these two might be crooked, because that’s the way it is with these things. Ashley Greene, as Matt’s daughter, doesn’t get much to do except look scared as her character gets into one precarious situation after another. There’s also a welcome appearance by Ernie Hudson, of Ghostbusters fame, as one of Matt’s old agency buddies.
Death comes in a variety of ways, and is usually lavish and brutal, almost always at the hands of Matt, who has clearly been doing more in the Caymans than drinking beer – there’s barely glimpsed workout gear in his garden at one point, so there’s a clue.
There’s a brilliant scene involving Matt lowering his daughter off a high hotel balcony on a rope, which probably contravenes the laws of gravity. But like most spoof actioners, this movie decides to get a bit more serious in its last stretch and become a touch more action and a touch less comedy. I’m always reminded of the 1999 movie Mystery Men when this happens, a hilarious spoof superhero movie that lost it when it tried to play it straight in its final scenes.
The Retirement Plan loses energy, ironically, as it goes all-in on the action. Brown turns out to be better at mocking pastiche than choreographing actual proper action sequences. But let’s not take things too seriously – you’ll have had your fun by that point.
The Retirement Plan – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
