Old Guy Is an Underwritten Action Outline, Despite Christoph Waltz’s Charm

Simon West’s Old Guy is one of those movies where at some point within its first third, you can’t help but start to feel that if as much interest had been devoted to a screenplay and some action choreography as was devoted to casting, you might actually have something of value. Alas, this is instead what the outline of a movie looks like when nothing around that outline really gets filled in: Characters assigned as archetypes with likable actors, who are sadly left flailing without much of anything to do, symbolically abandoned by the people who hired them. I’m sort of surprised the film is seeing even a limited theatrical release: More than any other I’ve encountered in recent memory, its aesthetic screams “streaming service original,” an arena where its basic deficiencies would be more easily overlooked. Surely that’s where Old Guy will be headed before long, and surely that’s where it will feel most at home–among so many other premise-over-substance properties.

All Old Guy has to stand on is its high-concept premise and simplicity, as encapsulated in its logline: Danny Dolinski (Christoph Waltz) is an aging, hard-partying contract killer or hitman of some U.K. renown, who finds himself saddled with the unwelcome task of training a replacement, 20-something Wihlborg (Cooper Hoffman). It’s meant to be an odd couple action comedy, where the titular, crochety Old Guy learns some new tricks and comes to terms with his limitations and mortality, and the cocky young gun gets to sit under the learning tree and absorb a little humility. You know, a little Lethal Weapon sort of riff, with hit men. And honestly, both Waltz and Hoffman are perfectly up to the task, even if their interactions largely boil down to clichéd generation clash observations–oh no, the 21-year-old man paints his nails! Even then, their dynamic could likely have worked thanks to the strength of the performers (largely Waltz, who is good as ever), but the story they’re dropped into is so thin–bereft of interesting action, and largely bereft even of jokes–that they’re left casting about for anything to grab onto.

Almost everything in Old Guy operates on this level of seemingly intentional vagueness. Wihlborg is described as being a “prodigy” killer, but it’s entirely unclear what this would mean for their industry, given that the pair’s sophisticated assassination techniques primarily tend to involve walking up to a target–sometimes in public–shooting him, and leaving the scene. Perhaps we could have illustrated what makes him better than any other warm body with a working trigger finger? The organization that both Wihlborg and Dolinski work for, meanwhile, is undefined to the point of comedy–at no point is it the least bit clear what the alignment of “The Company” is, or what kind of targets Dolinski has spent several decades eliminating. Their office is simply referred to as “London,” while the Belfast-based rival hit man organization they’re eventually put up against is called … “Belfast”. Does every city apparently have one of these outfits? We don’t know. Does one of the two organizations represent relatively lighter or darker moral territory? We don’t know. Is there even a Big Bad in the Belfast organization for our protagonists to face off against? Would you believe that the character you’d expect to fill this archetype doesn’t even show up on screen until the last 10 minutes or so? In this sense, I suppose Old Guy is more novel in some respects than I’ve been giving it credit for: Few action comedies, in addition to sidelining action and comedy, also make themselves into experiments in foregoing a true antagonist. But this one does.

All anyone actually cared about here was casting: They wanted Old Guy to have the right consummate look for a movie poster. Ironically, that poster probably exists only in digital format, because where would you actually display a physical poster for this film? Christoph Waltz was a fine choice for Dolinski–he brings just enough of the excitable, insecure energy to the role that he also exuded so famously as Hans Landa, a man who wants to be seen and acknowledged as a mastermind when he’s really a supreme fool. Here he’s the classic aging lothario who can’t let go, still waking up each morning in a pile of three nameless but seemingly satisfied women, conquests that he feels the need to constantly repeat just to prove to himself that he can. It’s the lynchpin of his party shark ethos–he can’t stop, or he’ll die. He either keeps pushing the red lines, even with a bum hand that will barely let him fire a gun, or admit that he’s become useless–which to Dolinski, would be a fate worse than death.

That’s not a bad basis for a protagonist, in a movie like Old Guy. But you know what else you need on a poster, right? Yep, we’re going to need at least one woman on there, and in casting that particular role, the producers here managed to drag poor Lucy Liu down into the mire of embarrassment. It is painfully clear that the thought process by which she was chosen boiled down to calculating the nexus of: