Red Bovie (Robert Duvall) is a cantankerous, octogenarian Texas rancher who’s been forced to sell off his property. Faced with the bleak prospect of moving into a trailer park, he balks and takes off for the border in his Cadillac. Red’s uneasy passenger is his grandson Gally (Jeremy Irvine), an urbanite in a too-clean cowboy hat and boots who’s come south to find the grandfather he never knew.
Nobody does the rebellious-elder thing as well as Duvall (see also: 2009’s “Get Low”), and whenever he’s center stage in “A Night in Old Mexico,” this scrappy film from Spanish director Emilio Aragon is entertaining enough. Its setting, a Day of the Dead celebration in a Mexican town, imbues the proceedings with plenty of colorful ambiance — not to mention a handy running reference to mortality.
Red heckles his handsome, timid grandson about his faux-Western getup; starts a fight with a bar full of drunks; leads an entire brothel onto the dance floor and wins the affections of a dishy, world-weary nightclub singer named Patty (Angie Cepeda) who’s tired of having to get half-naked to make ends meet. Yeah, she’s way too young for Duvall, but you almost buy it — they seem like they’re living out the lyrics of some dusty Marty Robbins song.
Unfortunately, there’s a clichéd bag-of-money plot surrounding Red’s hell-with-old-age night out, which would have made a more unique movie on its own. After he and Gally intersect with two drifters (Jim Parrack and James Hébert) and a backpack containing ill-gotten cash, the escapade turns into a heist, with Red deciding he’ll do whatever it takes to get the funds to keep him out of the “tin can” back in Texas.
Parrack, whom you’ll recognize from “True Blood,” makes a serviceably malevolent lowlife; the scene in which he and Hébert hitch a ride from Red builds tension as the thugs drain Red’s beer cooler and grow increasingly menacing. But they’re cast aside eventually in favor of bigger, more conventional baddies (Joaquín Cosio, Luis Tosar) with bigger guns — the ones who invariably show up when a large amount of unmarked bills goes missing.
Irvine (“War Horse”) has a tough time of it, as his character undergoes a rather implausibly quick transformation from sheltered urbanite to cowboyish man of action. We never get to know, or particularly like, Gally enough to care all that much about his learning to grab life by the horns. His best scenes are the quiet ones with Duvall, in which Red reflects on his estrangement from Gally’s father. Whenever Duvall’s in charge, “Old Mexico” feels pretty darn youthful.