- Critic Score
- Most active
- Publication
- Most clicked
-
100The thing most people will take away from Stand Up Guys is that it contains Al Pacino's best performance in years. So if you don't think Al Pacino still has it in him, this is a welcome chance to be proved wrong. But here's something interesting. Stand Up Guys also contains Christopher Walken's best performance in years. In addition, the film is extraordinarily well cast, and the acting, even in the smaller roles, is more than noteworthy.
-
88Sometimes it's all about the casting. The notice of a screening came around, I read the names Al Pacino, Christopher Walken and Alan Arkin, and it didn't matter in a way what the movie was about - although it didn't hurt that it was a crime movie.
-
Dec 4, 201270Stand Up Guys never wobbles into maudlin or cheap-n-easy sentimentality. It is an entertaining yet sobering portrayal of not-so-wise guys who do not go gently into a no-good night.
-
Dec 4, 201270Veering between buddy movie and action-thriller, Stand Up Guys is a mildly raunchy, modestly entertaining geriatric comedy.
-
67Stand Up Guys reminds you that these three are still way too good to collapse into shticky self-parody, even when they're in a movie that's practically begging them to.
-
63Some actors don't need top-shelf material. Just the pleasure of their company is enough. And so Al Pacino, Christopher Walken and Alan Arkin turn the insubstantial Stand Up Guys into solid entertainment.
-
Dec 13, 201263Fails to plumb the dramatic depths of its setups, but every now and then the actors pick up the slack, filling in the blanks with three decades's worth of mythic resonance.
-
60Stand Up Guys becomes something not only enjoyable but memorable and emotionally layered at the same time.
-
60Pacino, long ago having given up subtlety for bombast, continues along that path here, but he's still fun to watch.
-
60While the action is brisk, the film never feels in a hurry. Walken and Pacino amble through their paces. Arkin ups the adrenaline any time he's around, and he is not around quite enough.
-
60Most of the modest pleasures are in the ways the men expertly play off one another and invest their shallow characters with more depth than any filmmaker could reasonably expect.
-
50It's Walken who grounds every scene with the kind of watchful honesty that has become his brand in late-career.
-
50Elegiac and corny and not really convincing on any level (especially when it comes to its treatment of women - be they hookers, or waitresses, or girls on the town), Stand Up Guys nonetheless holds some fascination just for the off-the-charts affectedness of Pacino's performance.
-
50The central premise is a half-hearted retread. And the gags come from a score of earlier films and sitcoms.
-
40The script is undernourished, the supporting characters - including a horribly miscast Lucy Punch - ill-conceived, and Val increasingly hard to take. But when the movie ended, I wanted to watch Walken all over again.
-
38It's been a long time since a movie wasted as much talent as Stand Up Guys, a film that aims to be a geezer "Goodfellas" but whose execution is a misfire.
-
38We get it: Stand Up Guys is supposed to be cutesy criminal magic realism. But Stevens, an actor turned director, never finds the right vibe, and the movie's genuinely creepy misogyny sours the attempts to go sentimental in the final act.
-
38Dare we say it? Even the acting is atrocious, with pop-eyed Pacino chewing the scenery like a geezer gumming his oatmeal.
-
33It's like stocking a team with proven performers and hoping that everything else will work itself out at the end, including a rickety script, indifferent direction, and a plot that pretends its final act is anything other than a cliché-hugging inevitability.
-
30It's long on Viagra jokes and whorehouse scenes, and comes up short on plausibility.
-
30Stevens wants to honor the living legends who have miraculously agreed to appear in his movie, but after spending a full hour treating their characters like cartoons, the about-face into heartfelt slop lacks the necessary gravitas.
-
30A buddy movie that limps along, pausing for breath and pulse checks like a geriatric dutifully fulfilling doctor's orders to get some exercise.
-
Dec 11, 201230But by the end, the feeling the movie inspires isn't suspense but relief: Thank God that the producers behind "Grumpy Old Men" and "The Sunshine Boys" didn't yet have Viagra to joke about.
-
25It's often said that actors with distinctive vocal styles could compellingly read the phone book -- in this case, it would absolutely be a more entertaining hour-and-a-half.
-
25An excruciating and melodramatic comedy.
-
25Arkin in particular can barely hide his lack of enthusiasm for the material. Some of the looks he shoots his co-stars appear to contain a secret code of some kind, deciphered as: 'Well, at least I'm in 'Argo.'"
-
25The leads here aren't the only element of the film that's past its prime.
-
25Painful, misshapen and a little gross. It's an enlarged prostate of a movie.
-
Jan 30, 201320Does anyone, young or old, wish to see a 72-year-old Pacino sporting spiky hair and goatee, hollering in his "Tony Montana" voice about having a boner? Is he in a contest with Mick Jagger to see who can keep up the wild-man shtick into the triple digits?
-
20This moronically unfunny gangster comedy fluctuates wildly between the lowest-of-low humor and pity-the-aged-man pathos, and offers further evidence that the best days are behind its iconic cast members.