Alan Arkin can grumble with the best of them. “My face is killing me! I never had to smile so much in my life,” he says in “Going in Style,” which is regrettably not a problem I had. Despite the considerable charms and chemistry of Arkin, Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman, this reboot of the 1979 George Burns comedy is as creaky as its would-be bank robbers’ joints.
The plot — three Brooklyn retirees who’ve been cheated out of their pensions because of corporate greed plan a revenge heist — would seem to be more relevant than ever. “These banks crushed a lot of people’s dreams, and nothing ever happened to them!” rants Caine’s character, Joe. Indeed.
And yet director Zach Braff, who’s been serving up diminishing returns since 2004’s “Garden State,” fails to nail the tone. “Going in Style” wants to have it both ways, paying lip service to the idea that society ignores its elders, yet never putting that concept into practice. When Joe and Willie (Freeman) are doing a shoplifting training run at a local supermarket, you’d think the joke might be nobody notices they’re shoving entire hams and bags of flour into their pants, because old people are invisible. Instead, we get a cue-the-plucky-strings chase around the parking lot, with a security guard in pursuit of Caine driving a senior-citizen scooter and Freeman, humiliatingly, sprawled in the front basket.
The comedy also waters down its humor for the widest possible (read: not R-rated) audience, depriving its leads of some punchier fun. Arkin’s character, Albert, stumbles into an affair with a randy neighbor (Ann-Margret, in a possible homage to her role in the superior “Grumpy Old Men”), but it’s largely conducted off-screen; Caine never gets to swear much beyond the occasional “bloody.”
It’s frustrating, because there’s a better movie lurking just out of reach. Scenes featuring the trio simply hanging out are the film’s best; all three actors do fine work as lifelong friends who’ve seen the world around them become a faster, shallower, more callous place to live. As they sit at the local senior center eating watery spaghetti and swapping wry life-expectancy jokes — especially Willie, who’s hiding the fact that he’s in renal failure — you want to stay longer. But too often there’s a cutesy cutaway or a demeaning old-people gag.
The wonderful Christopher Lloyd appears briefly as a goggle-eyed (what else?) fellow pensioner, but his main directive seems to have been to play “dementia-prone” rather than his signature “daffy,” which is not as funny as the film seems to think it is.
Ultimately, all signs point to “Going in Style” having been overcooked by too many chefs: You know you’re in trouble when multiple scenes in the trailer never show up in the final product.