Last Vegas (2013)
Directed by Jon Turteltaub
Aging pals Billy, Paddy, Archie, and Sam have been best friends since childhood. When Billy finally proposes to his much-younger girlfriend, all four friends go to Las Vegas to celebrate the end of Billy's longtime bachelorhood and relive their glory days. However, the four quickly realize that the intervening decades have changed Sin City and tested their friendship in ways they had not imagined.
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When Freeman wins big at blackjack, the hotel comps them the penthouse room promised to the rapper 50 Cent, whose cameo recalls Mike Tyson's in "The Hangover."
There's even a cameo from rapper 50 Cent (Curtis Jackson), perhaps in a fond nod to Mike Tyson's turn in The Hangover.
Marketed as a sort of The Hangover for senior citizens, Last Vegas proves much less audacious and much less funny than its theoretical inspiration, relying on predictable humor and equally predictable sentiment instead of something bold or unexpected.
Frequently referenced as the geriatric The Hangover, the studio played up that angle highlighting the character’s frustration with not being as young as they used to be.
Despite its obvious comparisons to The Hangover, Last Vegas possesses none of that film's distinctive aesthetic or scattered moments of subversion, and the appearance of Jerry Ferrara as the senior wolfpack's hapless fixer only cements the realization that what it resembles more than anything else is late-period Entourage.
This is basically a geriatric version of “The Hangover”—four seventy-somethings go off to Vegas for a bachelor party—but since the target audience is clearly closer in age to the lead actors than to the moviegoers who made Todd Phillips’ slob comedy such a smash, the comedic tone of Jon Turteltaub’s movie is understandably gentler—naughty rather than nasty.
Michael Douglas stars as Billy, whose glamorous California life and gorgeous squeeze (Bre Blair) at first suggest “Last Vegas” could turn into “Grown Ups,” in which Adam Sandler gives his character tons of cash and Salma Hayek.
Sure, the actors seem to enjoy each others’ company, but that was true in Adam Sandler’s wretched “Grown Ups.”
The script by Dan Fogelman , who also wrote last year's "Crazy Stupid Love," is in the same vein as that film, nakedly sentimental but also determined to land every joke, and it's a pretty simple affair.
Director Jon Turteltaub knows his way around a crowd-pleaser (he did “Cool Runnings” and “National Treasure”), and Dan Fogelman (“Crazy, Stupid, Love”) contributes a decent script.
Director Jon Turteltaub (National Treasure, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice), working from an original screenplay by Dan Fogelman (Tangled; Crazy, Stupid, Love.), begins the film with a Brooklyn-set blast from the past.
The second-consecutive disappointment from writer Dan Fogelman (“Crazy Stupid Love,” “The Guilt Trip”) frustratingly plays it safe, refusing any significant mistakes or juicy impulses in favor of jokes like a young girl asking Sam for drugs so he can respond, “Does Lipitor count?”
The script by Dan Fogelman (Crazy, Stupid, Love., The Guilt Trip) is as formulaic and predictable as they come.
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.