Bucket List Hangover: LAST VEGAS

Far and away the funniest thing about Last Vegas, a comedy about a bunch of old guys reuniting for a weekend in Las Vegas, is something that’s not intended to be a joke. It’s a movie about guys trying to recapture their better days that hopes the audience remembers its cast’s. Michael Douglas, Morgan Freeman, Robert DeNiro, and Kevin Kline have been on the big screen since before I was born and in their many decades of work have been in some of the best movies of all time. Last Vegas is not among their better efforts, but at least it’s not a total embarrassment. It’s certainly not any more than not an embarrassment, but that’s not nothing. The movie is built only to capitalize on their likability derived from all their time spent building up loads of audience affection. It’s counting on it, in fact, to fill in generic jokes and slight plotting. The movie is pleasant, undemanding, and flimsy.

It’s an old person hangout movie in which likable and wrinkly familiar faces sit around and enjoy each other’s company while working through some old tensions that are saddled upon their characters in a mostly doomed attempt to differentiate them from the actors’ personas. The story starts when the guy played by Michael Douglas calls his old pals and tells them he’s getting married in Vegas that weekend. They, being retired and not particularly busy, make the appropriate travel arrangements and head off for a septuagenarian bachelor party. It’s The Bucket List by way of The Hangover, but not nearly as schmaltzy or raunchy as that comparison suggests. There’s all the gentle geriatric humor you’d suspect such a premise would invite.

Talk of surgery, pills, and doctors’ orders mixes freely with misunderstanding slang, fumbling around gadgets, shouting over pounding nightclub music, and talking to the much younger partiers around them. One young lady tells Kline he reminders her of “Grandpa Lou.” The concierge tells them their suite was previously booked by 50 Cent. “Fifty people in here?” Freeman marvels. A nice lounge singer played by Mary Steenburgen shows up from time to time, and she’s a nice break from the borderline sleazy montages of poolside bikinis and showgirls. It’s nice to give the guys someone closer to their own age to interact with.

Director Jon Turteltaub, who as of late has been making tame action movies like National Treasure for Disney, and screenwriter Dan Fogelman, of Crazy, Stupid, Love and The Guilt Trip, keep the proceedings loose and mellow. They don’t spend too much time insisting on their movie’s funniness, which makes it easier to take the fact that it isn’t all that funny. It goes down smoothly since it’s not spending its time being obviously unfunny. It’s just watchable and friendly. Even the prerequisite mistaken identity crossdresser gag is relatively kind and free of shame or awkwardness, as a more casually hateful comedy would stoop to. No, here all are welcome to relax with the old guys, have a few drinks, reminisce, play some blackjack, and party till it’s time to take more Lipitor. It’s too somnambulant to work up the energy for more than a handful of moments that even threaten to be in bad taste.

Without being in a hurry to get much of anywhere, Last Vegas simply shuffles along through rote comic beats and unrushed sightseeing. Someone’s going to fall into the pool. Someone’s going to either win or lose a great deal of his pension on the casino floor. Someone’s going to try to use that little blue pill before the weekend is over. It’s a film that lazily lollops its way to pretty much exactly where you think it’ll go. There’s not much inherently funny about any of this – no, not when Kline puts on his reading glasses to ogle a pretty girl, or when Freeman busts a disco move, or when DeNiro is grinded upon by LMFAO’s Redfoo. It’s barely even worth a chuckle when 50 Cent turns up as himself, asking the guys to keep the noise down because he’s trying to sleep. It’s supposed to be funny because he’s 50 Cent, much like the rest of the lame jokes are supposed to be funny because of the cast of legendary actors who also happen to be old. It’s a bland, vacant experience. I’d rather see a movie about what these guys did between takes. Over the credits they could roll footage of whatever they’ve bought with their paychecks. 

Charm Offensive: THE SORCERER'S APPRENTICE

It’s not every day that you can see a big summer action-adventure based on a Goethe poem that was previously adapted into a short segment in the beloved Fantasia, but that’s exactly what you get with The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. It’s loud and expensive, much like other Jerry Bruckheimer productions including the dumb National Treasures which share, in Jon Turteltaub, the same director as this new feature. They also share the same star, Nicolas Cage, but Sorcerer’s Apprentice has the good sense to embrace the actor’s loopier side.

Looking through a mess of long hair and a floppy fedora, with a long trenchcoat flapping behind him, Nicolas Cage certainly looks the part of a more than one-thousand-year-old sorcerer now living in Manhattan, who trained under Merlin and has spent centuries searching for his master’s replacement. Cage hams it up, bugging out his crazy eyes and strutting through each scene with a magical confidence. He’s also hilarious. Early in the film, following a statement made by Cage, a character asks “how do you know that?” Cage spins and fixes a wild gaze on the character while shouting “because I can read minds!” Total commitment to a ridiculous role is the name of the game here, and the film is better for Cage’s participation.

It helps that Cage is facing off with a rival ancient sorcerer played by Alfred Molina, who brings an equal commitment to his suavely villainous cheeseball. He makes a grand entrance, forming out of a squirming mass of cockroaches. Out of all the actors in the world, perhaps only Molina could look so effortlessly nonchalant about a cockroach crawling up his nostril in his first big close-up. He’s having a ball, chewing on all his lines with clear satisfaction and infectious fun.

The two sorcerers are after a nesting doll that contains the trapped essences of various evil magicians from centuries past. Cage wishes to keep it out of the hands of Molina, who wants to free the evil in order to raise an army of the dead. To further complicate matters, this hunk of magical wood was inadvertently lost a decade earlier by college student Jay Baruchel, who may just be the one true heir to Merlin’s powers. Cage suspects as much, so he takes the lad under his wing to teach him the ways of using sorcery for good, not evil. And, of course, he’ll need his help to battle all the encroaching forces of darkness. What would a summer blockbuster be without encroaching forces of darkness?

This all sounds complicated, but the film wears its mythology lightly, preferring instead to go right for the big, splashy, effective set-pieces involving all kinds of kinetic magical danger and derring-do. Mixed in is a healthy dose of humor. This is a movie that is faintly aware of just how ridiculous it own story is. Cage and Molina aren’t the only ones having a ball. Baruchel is charming and funny as a geeky asocial guy who only cares about this girl (Teresa Palmer) that he’s loved since he was ten and with whom he just might be making a connection. She might even want to, you know, date him. And then all this crazy stuff about legends and curses and magic and good and evil? It’s almost more than he can take.

I went into the theater with very low expectations and, while I wasn’t blown away, I was pleasantly surprised. This is a mostly fast moving and enjoyable experience. The effects are convincing and are put to good use. It’s genuinely exciting and amusing. The Sorcerer’s Apprentice is not great, but it’s much better than the majority of this summer’s offerings from this genre, and it’s certainly just right for an uncomplicated couple of hours at the multiplex.