Review: Last Vegas

Last Vegas

What do you get when you put four amazing, ageing actors in a movie where they play best friends reuniting for a part in Last Vegas? You get a movie that offer few surprises but more than a few big laughs.

So let’s recap. Morgan Freeman, Kevin Kline, Michael Douglas and Robert De Niro play men pushing 70 who have been best friends since they were 6 years old. Michael Douglas is the ladies man of the group and is finally getting married so the rest of them shuffle their way to Las Vegas for a bachelor party. Along the way they meet Mary Steenburgen, a sassy lounge singer who takes a shine to one of them.

De Niro and Douglas are the two main characters and at the start of the movie they are of course at odds, a conflict that will be resolved by movies end. Freeman and Kline are the tag alongs, the supporting characters. They are there to make fools of themselves and offer one liners and not much else.

The plot goes pretty much exactly as you’d expect. Basically it’s Grumpy Old Men in Vegas if that helps but basically the get to Vegas, things appear to go slightly awry bt then turn out to have gone spectacularly, they party like it’s 1959, show all the kids how it’s really done and make a few ‘old people don’t get technology’ jokes out for good measure.

Everyone gets a scene where their character makes a realization about themselves and the nature of their relationship to someone else in their life, everyone grows and they part maybe as slightly closer friends than they arrived.

Like I said there’s nothing here that’s very surprising but it’s fun to see four great actors hamming it up and gallivanting around Vegas like they’re 40 years younger than they are.

So that’s pretty much it. You want to take your best girl to the movies? Last Vegas is a pretty safe bet for a few laughs over a bag of popcorn.