The “aging hit man” movie trope tends to rear its silver head every couple of decades or so, as the elder generation finds itself, by choice or through force, making way for the next.
I’ve seen so many of them in recent memory (Kingsman, John Wick, the latter Bond movies) I’ve started to feel like I am one (for legal reasons I must confirm that I am not), and yet, despite their ubiquity, these stories more often than not remain compelling. Old Guy, the new action comedy from Con Air and The Expendables 2 director Simon West, finds itself smack in the middle of this mix of melancholy and absurdity, following an infamous contract killer desperate to prove he still has the sauce, and an agency just as desperate to replace him.
Danny Dolinski (Christoph Waltz), powering through an arthritic injury to his trigger hand, finds himself relegated to babysitting duty when his employer puts him in charge of foppish Gen Z newcomer Wihlborg (Cooper Hoffman), a newbie hit man sporting painted fingernails, an array of Bushwick-lite bomber jacket and boots combos, and a race-car totem hanging from his neck.
Wihlborg is a talented killer, but he often ends up mowing down everyone in the vicinity of his targets, and the agency is hoping a little of Dolinski’s famous precision can rub off on him when they send the two on a mission of violence to Belfast, Northern Ireland. Reluctantly tagging along is Anata (Lucy Liu), a longtime friend of Dolinski who supports his ambitions but hopes he’ll come to his senses and get out of the game before he gets himself killed.
Old Guy is a bit of an odd duck when it comes to movies like this—billed as an action-comedy, it’s a lot more downbeat for most of its runtime than its promotional material would have you believe. The shoot-outs (which are fine, not great) take a back seat to the interpersonal drama. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, and the movie is oftentimes much better as a drama about a lonely man who really isn’t as lonely as he thinks he is, who is desperate to prove his worth to people who stopped caring once he reached a certain age. Less Equalizer, more Best Exotic Marigold Hotel.
Weirdly, for a movie that really has three characters and some additional satellites in orbit around them, you still get the sense that there could have been more to these relationships. We get a little bit of Dolinski and Anata’s complex friendship, and we get a little bit of Dolinski and Wihlborg’s rivalry, but not quite enough of either, to the point that you wonder if the movie’s 90-ish minutes wouldn’t have been better spent focusing on just one or the other. It’s frustrating, because it’s all very interesting, and, again, more meditative than these movies tend to get, and probably would have been great if it had leaned further into what sets it apart from its more swashbuckling peers.
Much of this sense that the movie isn’t spending enough time on the things that really matter stems from the structure: characters are constantly stating their relationships to one another and explaining how they feel about what happens in any given scene, to the point that there are no surprises left once the whole business reaches its semi-climactic conclusion. It’s a fine way to make a movie like this, but it lacks a certain subtlety that this particular film could have benefitted from.
Old Guy is not going to break down any new barriers for the genre, but the performances from its trio of leads hold enough action-comedy charm to make it worth checking out. Its lack of cinematic action juice is made up for in part by its willingness to focus on the small stuff, proving that even when these movies start to feel a little stale, they’ll never get old.
