As creaky as an arthritic hip, "Last Vegas" does for four leading stars of the '70s and '80s what movies like "Tough Guys" and "Grumpy Old Men" did for survivors of Hollywood's storied Golden Age: It lets them show they can still throw a punch, bust a move, and get it on, and that they're not quite ready for the Motion Picture Home just yet. Beyond that, this genteel "Hangover" for the AARP crowd has little to recommend it, though a smattering of funny gags and the nostalgia value of the cast keeps the whole thing more watchable than it has any right to be.
One doesn't exactly expect "Death in Venice" from a movie that begins on a shot of female cellulite jiggling beneath the surface of a Florida community pool. But as various senior-centric pics have proven, from Martin Brest's delightful caper "Going in Style" to Ron Howard's "Cocoon," going gray isn't automatically an impediment to a screenplay that consists of more than death and Viagra jokes. But "Last Vegas" scribe Dan Fogelman (who wrote the monumentally smarter and shrewder "Crazy, Stupid, Love") pretty much sticks to the lowest common denominator as he contrives to get four childhood friends together in Sin City for the bachelor party of the last unmarried man among them.
He's named Billy and played by a blow-dried, spray-tanned Michael Douglas in what feels like a watered-down version of the actor's magnificent aging lothario from 2009's "Solitary Man." When Billy impulsively proposes to his strapping 31-year-old girlfriend (in the midst of delivering a friend's eulogy, no less), best bud Sam (Kevin Kline) — the one trapped in that infernal Florida swimming pool — suggests a boy's weekend in Vegas, and the rest of this white-haired wolf pack is soon to follow. Back when they were kids on the streets of Brooklyn, Billy and his pals were known as the Flatbush Four, though now they're mainly just flat and bushed: In addition to Sam, there's stroke survivor Archie (Morgan Freeman, essentially reprising his "Bucket List" character) and surly widower Paddy (Robert De Niro), who hasn't forgiven Billy for skipping out on his wife's funeral (she was their shared childhood sweetheart).
From all points they converge on the ultra-luxurious Aria casino resort, where they find themselves comped with a penthouse suite — and a personal concierge (Romany Malco) — after Archie cleans house at the blackjack table. That pretty much gives them the run of the place, though they do make one important side trip to nearby Binion's, where Billy catches the eye of a jazz chanteuse shimmering in a sparkly mauve gown as she belts out "Only You" in a desolate hotel bar.
The singer, Diana (Mary Steenburgen), is also "of a certain age" and has been around the block a few times, but unlike her male counterparts in "Last Vegas," she's been written as more than a one-dimensional type, and she's played by the marvelous Steenburgen with a richness that goes even beyond what's on the page. She's an oasis of real, grown-up emotion in a movie that often feels more sophomoric (and a lot less funny) than the concurrent "Bad Grandpa."
The rest of the movie rarely if ever rises to Steenburgen's level. Most of the comic payoffs are so obviously telegraphed that the audience can see them coming within a few frames of the setup. Actors like these can sometimes be a pleasure to watch even when saddled with sitcom material, because their timing and delivery is still better than most. But in "Last Vegas," everyone seems to be on a mildly diverting paid vacation, especially Freeman, who can scarcely disguise his contempt for the material. He doesn't just seem to be phoning it in; he seems to be emailing it in from his trailer.
?b -vp alibration of Hollywood's "Gone With the Wind" point of view. In a striking review, Grantland's Wesley Morris said the film "radically shifts the perspective of the American racial historical drama from the allegorical uplift to the explanatory wallop."
"If I was an alien and landed on Earth and looked at the history of films, I wouldn't think that there would be no slave narrative, or very little," says McQueen, the British video artist-turned filmmaker.
McQueen believes the confluence of films suits the times.
"With the unfortunate death of Trayvon Martin, with having a black president, with the 150th anniversary of the abolition of slavery, the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington, it's sort of like this perfect storm which has occurred where, I think, people are ready to receive the film in a way maybe they haven't been before," he says.
If "12 Years a Slave" goes on to win the best picture Oscar (a prediction of many — though certainly not all — Academy Awards onlookers), it would be the first best picture winner directed by a black filmmaker. The best actor category, too, is full of African American contenders, including Ejiofor, Whitaker, Elba and Jordan.
The Oscars (which Chris Rock once called a "million white man march") have increasingly served as celebratory breakthroughs in Hollywood's racial ceiling. For 2001, two black actors won the top acting prizes for the first time: Denzel Washington ("Training Day") and Halle Berry ("Monster's Ball"). Dual wins for Morgan Freeman ("Million Dollar Baby") and Jamie Foxx ("Ray") followed for 2004, as did the combination of Whitaker ("The Last King of Scotland") and Jennifer Hudson ("Dreamgirls") for 2006.
But those tipping points were followed by more incremental progress. The 2011 best-picture nominee "The Help" was viewed by many in the black community as the embrace of a stereotype (another story of racial injustice starring a white person).
Last week, a USC Annenberg study supplied a reminder of Hollywood realities. The school analyzed the 500 top-grossing films at the U.S. box office in recent years. Last year, African-Americans represented 10.8 percent of all speaking characters. (Hispanics at 4.2 percent and Asians with 5 percent fared even worse.) Between 2007 and 2012, the 565 directors of the top 500 films included only 33 black filmmakers, and just two of them black women.
The imbalance also affects the kind of roles black actors receive. Black males are notably less likely to play romantic partners or parents, according to the study.
Most of this year's wave of films relied not on Hollywood studios for distribution, but independent distributors, and had to hunt hard for financing. Lee Daniels and the late producer Laura Ziskin sought out wealthy African-Americans to fund "The Butler."
"It's politically incorrect ... to scream racism in Hollywood, in America," says Daniels. "It's time to now not do that. We've got to call it as we see it."
Change, of course, can come in spurts, and the discussion generated by the films this year has only just started. Vanity Fair's James Wolcott recently claimed the movies are provoking a national conversation on race that politicians have failed to generate. New York magazine's Frank Rich lamented that even a film such as "12 Years a Slave" can only accomplish so much outside of the movie theater.
"Dialogue is occurring," says Whitaker, who also helped produce "Fruitvale Station" and stars in "Black Nativity." ''People are taking their points of view about how they see their environment, their world. All these films are engaging in that dialogue."
But Whitaker emphasized there's a long way to go, still: "People act like it's a history as opposed to recognizing it as a movement," he says.
One could look at these movies as chronological snapshots of that movement: from the 19th century Louisiana plantation of "12 Years a Slave" to the Civil Rights upheaval of 20th century Washington in "The Butler," and finally to the contemporary prejudices of "Fruitvale Station."
"They're great stories which happen to tell the stories of black people," says Ejiofor. "I kind of have a suspicion that that's the way it should be."