Turteltaub: Last Vegas (2013)

Last Vegas follows a group of sixty-somethings, played by Michael Douglas, Morgan Freeman, Kevin Kline and Robert de Niro, who reunite in Las Vegas for a bachelor party. For the most part, it’s charmingly creaky, poised at that cosy cusp where it could just as easily have a laugh track as not, as Jon Turteltaub’s direction feels just as quaint and old-fashioned as his characters. As the film proceeds, it splits into two different comic registers, each of which play on incongruity, but in different ways. Half the time, we’re presented with the more predictable incongruity of these old geezers stumbling through the heaving MTV crowds of The Hangover franchise, trying to talk over Autotune anthems, and hear past dubstep drops. But for as many LMFAO or Black-Eyed Peas film clips that they stumble into, there’s another side to the city, one where they’re entirely congruent. And that’s where the other side of the film comes into play, as Turteltaub sketches out a version of Vegas that’s comically incongruous with how we usually see it in film - a city that subsists on seniors, swathed in a retiree haze that often makes it feel more like an offshoot of Florida than an escape from it, driven by oaky lounges and dusky variety shows, places that haven’t seen the light of day for as long as any of these characters have been around. Those are often the most organic, soulful moments of the film, when the “Flatbush Four” really come alive instead of just watching someone else’s music video, but in the end it’s the alternation between the two incarnations of Vegas that drives the comedy, if only because the actors have different strengths in each world. And while Kevin Kline’s probably the best at making the switch, it’s fascinating to see how Douglas moves between his playboy of the 80s/90s and his post-Liberace persona, since there are still traces of Liberace everywhere in his voice, just as there are traces of Liberace’s Vegas everywhere in this muffled seniorscape. Certainly, it’s just as tasteless, lowbrow and exploitative as The Hangover franchise, but it’s also kind of nice to see such an upbeat, affirmative film about old people, since there are no token lessons about mortality here, no morbidity, no guilt, no shame, just a group of sixty-somethings who get everything that they want – more life, more love, more sex, more fun and, of course, more Vegas.