Last Vegas ***

Jon Turteltaub’s Last Vegas is obviously pitched as a ‘mature’ The Hangover with a crowd-pleasing, all-star cast of Michael Douglas, Robert De Niro, Morgan Freeman and Kevin Kline, and Mary Steenburgen as the love interest. It has the potential of being quite a geriatric farce, and there are parts that are very funny in a sort of ‘ah, bless them’ afterthought. Much of the rest is not so much comfortably entertaining but sometimes a little flat. That said, each actor brings an element of what makes him uniquely special on the big screen, and that’s the key to the film’s box office success, not the story itself.

Billy (Douglas) is a wealthy, sixty-something playboy who is set to marry a woman half his age. He wants to have his bachelor party in Sin City but his circle of childhood friends, Paddy (De Niro), Archie (Freeman) and Sam (Kline), remains broken after a long-standing feud between him and Paddy who fell out over a girl. The group manage to reunite nevertheless, and give their friend a weekend to remember.

Like The Hangover, the four use the time away from worrying family members to let loose, except this film has none of the outrageous high jinx of the former, more age-comparison gags a plenty. True, there is a certain poignancy to the whole affair of how quickly time passes so cherish youth, and watching the ‘oldies’ in more youthful situations has its obvious amusement factor and is done in a respectful, almost cynically observed manner. The funniest of the bunch is Freeman who seems to use the opportunity to let his own hair down, with a particularly hilarious dancing scene at a nightclub – sadly, the trailer features part of that punchline.

Last Vegas has no less bromance to enjoy, with the moral of the story being the importance of friendship overriding everything. The same ideals surface where certain members rediscover themselves after having the space to release, but some of those ‘releases’ are naturally predictable, such as the mandatory babes-in-bikinis parade and Viagra jokes. It’s perhaps the fault of writer Dan Fogelman for not coming up with more unique scenarios for the boys to find themselves in, even though he does play to the screen personas of each actor. It’s all very safe in that respect, which seems a tragic waste of legendary talent.

Still, Last Vegas has some old-timers we love to watch and the opportunity for them to get a little naughty and decadent (for their age), even if you do wish for more absurdity.

3/5 stars

By @FilmGazer

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