Can someone please tell me what Zach Braff is doing directing Going In Style?
The once achingly hip poster boy for Generation X has become the cheerleader for Generation Geriatric. A remake of the 1979 movie which starred George Burns about three geezers pulling off a heist, the picture is just the kind of bland and lazy studio offering a tired hack would churn out for a paycheck. Not Zach “Scrubs” Braff.
The former golden boy of prime time TV made his directorial debut with 2004’s Garden State, an indie coming-of-age cult hit in which he co-starred with Natalie Portman. It earned $35 million at the box office and won Braff the Independent Spirit Award for Best First feature.
The only thing Going In Style might win is a Golden Raspberry. The movie is a comedy about a bank robbery but it’s the veteran actors—Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman and Alan Arkin—who appear to be in it for the money.
Caine, who plays an angry pensioner ripped off by a bank, has long made no secret of his willingness to work for the right price. This is the star, after all, who, when asked about his role in 1987 flop Jaws: The Revenge, admitted he had never seen the film but quipped: “However, I have seen the house it built and that’s terrific.”
Freeman has notched up numerous big paydays in iffy studios films about ageing like Last Vegas and The Bucket List. Nevertheless, both of those are works of award-worthy class and wit compared to Going In Style, a picture whose best joke consists of Caine struggling to get out of an armchair.
Arkin phones in a watered-down version of the misbehaving codger he played in Little Miss Sunshine—getting frisky with Ann-Margret’s saucy grandma—while Freeman plays the same type we’ve seen many times: nearly dead but still dignified; his character here suffers from kidney failure.
The only convincing moment is the final scene when the three old pals toast their success in snaffling millions of dollars—a case of art imitating life. Or should that be life imitating very bad art?
Braff, 42, claims he’s attracted to the “senior social issues” the film includes, but I think we can safely assume he too has done it for the dough. He reportedly lost a fortune of his own cash on his second film, Wish You Were Here, a mopey drama about a struggling actor.
That production famously raised $2million of its $6 million budget via crowdfunding site Kickstarter and Braff contributed much of the rest. The film bombed. A backlash against Garden State didn’t help; audiences belatedly decided it was rubbish and mocked the once cool Braff for his touchy-feely tweeness.
Braff directing Going in Style illustrates how studios are currently high on young (ish) actors getting behind the camera to reinvent old properties. Hollywood’s logic is evidently that getting a fresh-faced, name director to re-make a movie or beloved TV show will unlock ancient source material for the younger moviegoing demographic. (The catalyst for this template was set by 21 Jump Street‘s Phil Lord and Christopher Miller who were just 36 when they directed that inspired remake).
Instead the policy is threatening to throw a new generation of directors in movie jail. Consider Dax Shepard was given CHiPS by Warner Bros, the same studio who hired Braff.
They thought they were onto a winner, giving Shepard—star of long-running TV show Parenthood—the freedom to reinvent a family-friendly TV show as an R-rated buddy comedy. It was a disastrous decision.
Not only was the lame, sexist movie attacked by the show’s original stars, Erik Estrada and Larry Wilcox, as “sick crap” and “pure trash” but audiences found it dismally unfunny.
The problem? The motorcycle-obsessed Shepard had no respect or affinity for the original show, admitting that it merely served a purpose as a “brand” he could exploit. “I’m looking for anything that can combine those two things [comedy and motor sports] and that someone will make” he said.
The cheeky, chippy, tone of the original was replaced by crude homophobic “gags” and routines about bodily functions. Cue a backlash on social media against the movie from a significant slice of the generation Shepherd was hired to win over who accused CHiPS of being homophobic.
End result? A bike crash at the box office. Going In Style is not expected to fare any better—it’s predicted to earn a mere $8million in its opening weekend. This is not surprising since Braff has nothing remotely interesting to say about aging or society’s ills.
Let’s hope British actor and stand up comic-turned director Chris Addison, 45, has more luck behind the camera with his directorial movie debut Nasty Women, a gender-reversed reboot of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels set to star Anne Hathaway and Rebel Wilson.
Best known for his role as a hapless political adviser in Armando Iannucci’s TV satire The Thick Of It, Addison has directed several episodes of HBO’s Veep. MGM is hoping his satirical eye and sharp wit will turn the film into a zeitgeist-tapping hit.
With its title derived from Donald Trump’s Presidential debate line that went viral, however, and Addison’s own track record, Nasty Women seems to be adding a misguided political dimension to the tale of conmen swindling a heiress out of her fortune which ironically was last filmed in 1988 with Michael Caine.
Perhaps it will be third time lucky for the young actor-directors spearheading this remake trend. It’s more likely though that Hollywood will be cashing in its CHiPs on yet another failed movie strategy before too long.
