The Old Man & the Gun (2018)

 

 "The Old Man & the Gun" is a slow and sad, short but long version of "Catch Me If You Can". Short summary: both are biopics centered on an atypical villain - in this one, a bank thief in his 70's, in the other a crook and check forger before turning 20. In a sense, I guess the impression the movie leaves you with after the end is somehow proportional with the depth of the character. But I won't lengthen this entry by also adding a summary for "Catch Me If You Can" (just google for Frank Abagnale). 

In "The Old Man & the Gun" we have Robert Redford as Forrest Tucker, a guy who spent his entire life behind bars, between escapes (counting more than 16) perfecting a technique of robbing a bank in the most polite manner. The legend (and the movie) says that he done that without firing a single shot. What we have in this film is a brief look over the last few freedom windows the guy enjoyed in his life.

What transpires from the main character demeanor, but mostly from the acting for the cop who follows him (Casey Affleck) is a state of chronic boredom that reflects in the whole movie. The more-or-less 90 minutes it has seem like two hours and a half. Even if the '80s feeling is quite authentic, the cast is full of known names, and here and there we have something that catches our attention, there's a debilitating slowness consistent throughout the the movie length, and the permanent sense of something missing + also knowing that we won't have a happy end here, but neither an unhappy one...

If I think better on it now, I guess "Catch Me If You Can" is not the best reference to compare with. More appropriate would be "The Mule", which I had on my blog a couple months ago. We find there pretty much all the context elements we have here: a nice old guy who's a criminal mastermind, an almost frustrated cop who gets obsessed with the case, a romance episode at the dusk of someone's life. The difference is in the way all these are connected. Even though we also have a slow development there too, and the ending is pretty much the same in terms of "happiness", you want to keep watching to see what happens, unlike here where you'd rather not.

Rating: 2.5 out of 5