Fresh out of prison after a 28-year stint, career criminal Val (Al Pacino) is picked up at the gate by his old partner, Doc (Christopher Walken). The duo make some catch-up small talk, but all Val really wants to do is ‘party’. Doc goes along willingly to the local whorehouse and a singles bar. Yet he’s clearly in the dumps about something – namely, that he’s been contracted by a vicious mob boss to kill Val for a long-ago transgression.
This moronically unfunny gangster comedy fluctuates wildly between the lowest-of-low humour and pity-the-aged-man pathos, and offers further evidence that, for its iconic cast members, the best days are behind them. At least Walken’s sub-Tarantino posturing is counterbalanced by his stellar recent work in ‘A Late Quartet’ and ‘Seven Psychopaths’. But exhausted-looking Pacino has been coasting long enough that this latest lazy performance feels singularly depressing. He flails helplessly through torturously dragged-out gag sequences – the Viagra-overdose set piece is some kind of career nadir – and courts cheap-seats sentiment with a number of bathetic reminiscences about the old days. American cinema’s thrillingly rabid mongrel has become a pitiable mutt.