OLD GUY - Mark Reviews Movies

The Old Guy, The Avenue

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Review by Mark Dujsik | February 20, 2025

The three main actors in Old Guy are too good for it. The filmmakers should be grateful that the trio agreed to something so utterly predictable and generic.

Making Christoph Waltz an aging hit man, desperately trying to prove his worth while his body undermines his attempts, is a fine idea, to be sure. Casting Cooper Hoffman, a young actor who's showing considerable promise (not to mention an increasing resemblance to his late, great father), as the Waltz character's reckless trainee is a smart move, too.

Director Simon West also has Lucy Liu on board for this movie, and one really wishes somebody had given Greg Johnson's screenplay a once-over as soon as she was cast as the potential love interest for the older assassin. Instead, Liu, who can bring so much cutting intelligence to a role, just has to hang around with little to do until the movie decides the likely-romantic-partner angle is finally worth paying off. It's such a waste.

Look, Waltz and Hoffman are underutilized here, too, as they bicker and banter between scenes of mob politics and killings that go wrong. The obvious joke of the movie is that Waltz's Danny Dolinski is a hitman from an older time, when professional killers had some decorum and, as odd as it may seem, sense of morality. He doesn't kill innocent people, even if they get in the way of his assignment, because to do so would be uncouth.

Meanwhile, Hoffman's Wihlborg is a rising star, apparently, in the underworld of contract murder, but he has a bad habit of killing bystanders on every job he has taken. The innocent casualties, in fact, exceed the actual number of assignments he has performed. The two men are going to clash, beyond the fact that Danny's boss is clearly trying to arrange for Wihlborg to become his replacement.

In theory, the setup is worthwhile, especially because the filmmakers were smart or lucky enough to land the cast they have for this material. The big problem, beyond the fact that the intriguing characters simply become stock ones and pawns for the plotting, is that neither Johnson nor West seem to know what to actually do with this premise.

It tries to be serious, as Danny recovers from a surgery to fix the arthritic joints in his hand, feels as if his life and career are soon to pass him by, and becomes determined to do everything he's asked and more in order to show that he's still relevant, capable of working, and not ready to let time get the better of him. That notion is also played for laughs, though, because Danny can't even pull a trigger anymore without his hand seizing up in tremendous pain.

Pretty much every job he goes on here goes wrong, and adding insult to literal injury, the young guy is usually there to finish the bloody work for him or, at least, to make sure it doesn't go worse than it has. Meanwhile, Wihlborg is both a source of tension, because he could kill innocent people (including a little girl in one scene) and Danny—again, a professional murderer—believes his trainee has a touch of "psychopathy" to him, and a figure the movie views with some degree of sympathy.

In addition to the wholly inconsistent view of its own characters and their deeds, the tone here wavers back and forth between two very disparate modes. That makes it difficult to accept either the weird attempts at sincerity or the forced efforts at humor, no matter how much these actors may bring to their roles.

The plot, by the way, has Danny and Wihlborg sent from London to Belfast by their boss Opal (Ann Akinjirin) in a move for her criminal operation to take over the one in Northern Ireland. This amounts to scenes of the pair planning the hits, executing them, and realizing there are moves being made behind their backs. There's no sense of personality to the assassin politicking, because most of the side players are expendable targets to be knocked down later, and the action is made up of either routine shootouts or ones that can't decide if they're supposed to be suspenseful or amusing.

Still, the pairing of Waltz and Hoffman is enjoyable to watch to some degree, because the actors bring some off-kilter charm to roles that would probably be dull in other hands. Waltz and Liu have a scene or two together, as well, that touch upon getting older, realizing one's life isn't what was expected, and hoping for some kind of future in the growing shadow of age. It's not enough to compensate for the fact that Liu's Anata, Danny's friend and the manager of a brothel, doesn't have any logical reason to be in this story, apart from what she could mean for Danny, and Johnson never devises one, either.

A good cast can go a long way. In Old Guy, the stars take this thin, hollow material as far as they can, and even with their efforts, it's still not impressive.

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