Last Vegas is a paltry little movie, filled with pandering laughs and cheap jabs that prop up a tired, cliché-ridden plot. It could be easily distilled back into the producers’ meeting pitch: a Judd Apatow-style buddy comedy for the octogenarian set. It’s the story of four friends from Flatbush who reunite later in life for a bachelor party in Vegas. Cue the giggles generated by heart pill-popping, foul-mouthed, horny old men. And yet, something surprising happened during the packed pre-screening of the film I attended: it was a smash. The little jabs about the embarrassing, demeaning little things that paint old age as insufferably puerile; the sex jokes about Viagra, infidelity, and longing for teenage bodies; the dumb 20-something punks so easily out-guiled by the wit of experience: these comedic strategies drew raucous guffaws. And the sweet and sentimental storyline about two friends fighting over a girl and discovering their forgotten fidelity to each other made more than a few in the audience swoon.
It’s easy to blame the success of this bad little movie on the four stars. The producers wagered A-lists on its silly script, and Michael Douglas, Robert De Niro, Morgan Freeman, and Kevin Kline don’t have to work hard to make it work. The main narrative thrust involves a life-long spat between De Niro and Douglas. When they were kids, they fought over the same girl. De Niro eventually married her, had a blissful life of marriage while Douglas struggled to find love, moving through wives, and scoring a hot-bodied 30-year-old while he’s pushing 70. It’s Douglas’ cradle robbing marriage that brings them all to Vegas (and provides fodder for more than a dozen cradle-robbing jokes), and it’s Douglas’ failure to show up to De Niro’s wife’s funeral a year before that has turned the friend so sour. Nonetheless, the other two members of the posse trick De Niro into going to Vegas, and there they meet Diana (Mary Steenburgen), beautiful older woman who stirs both men’s hearts into orientating towards sincere affections.
This storyline is what gives Last Vegas shape, but it is the shallow, reductionist take on love, marriage, affection, and friendship that makes it not work as a dramatic comedy. If you’re looking for mature explorations of how the weight of time cures the heart, head elsewhere. Instead, it’s the college-style humor that works best in Last Vegas, and particularly when the sideshow characters, Freeman and Kline, work out their frustrated repressions. Kline cuts a serious silhouette, which only makes his blubbering, stumbling moments all the more hilarious. Freeman’s a crouched old codger, playing up fragility of the body in a way that belies the wildness of his ageless spirit. It all works on a level, and will likely please its intended demographic, as it certainly did in the preview screening. Identifiable, light-hearted moments of semi-insightful humor ensure that any reflections on life don’t wallow too deeply into melancholy to spoil the party.
