Truly, no movie is safe from the remake craze, and to that point, consider the trailer for Going in Style. This update is based on Martin Brest’s 1979 heist movie starring George Burns, Art Carney, and Lee Strasburg, about a trio of retirees who begin a string of robberies to break up the boredom of their settled lives.
There a few key differences already apparent in the remake: the men take up robbery in response to the loss of their pensions rather than for cheap thrills, and it doesn’t seem (so far) like the same level of Vegas chicanery present in the original will pop up here. Instead, the remake seems to be going to the endlessly popular “old men get up to hijinks” comedy well that’s been a staple of American studio movies for years. Morgan Freeman, Michael Caine, and Alan Arkin pick up the mantle of the aging thieves, and the movie seems to be aiming for a little more commentary about lives destroyed by modern banking. (So, Hell or High Water but with more old man laughs?)
It’s also directed by Zach Braff, who’s taking (to say the very least) a pretty hard departure from his previous directorial features in Garden State and Wish I Was Here. Maybe it’ll just be a director-for-hire situation, but we’ll hope some of that screwball comedy that once made Scrubs one of the funnier shows on television finds its way into Braff’s work here.
Going in Style will hit theaters on April 7th, bumped up from its previous May release against Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 2, which is probably a sound call for any and all movies to make.
