Review: The Old Man And The Gun

Image courtesy of Fox Searchlight Pictures.

Robert Redford may be hanging up his iconic hat with David Lowery's "The Old Man and the Gun," which is said to be his last film as an actor, but the character he portrays in the picture - Forrest Tucker, a real-life criminal who, apparently, made 16 daring escapes over the course of his career and continued to rob banks well into his 70s - has no intention of doing so.

With his latest picture, Lowery again proves that he has range as a filmmaker (his previous output was "Ain't Them Bodies Saints," the remake of "Pete's Dragon" and "A Ghost Story"), creating a love letter to a movie legend with a film that uses some familiar cinematic tropes - the outlaw continuing to work long past his prime, a romance that complicates things, etc. - in service of Redford's most wily performance in some time.

When we meet Tucker, he is part of a gang that includes two other cohorts played by Danny Glover and Tom Waits, who gets some of the best lines in the film. As the film opens, Tucker is fleeing his latest robbery and he meets a woman named Jewel (Sissy Spacek), a widow who has no problem calling out Tucker on his bullshit. When he reveals to her his line of work, she thinks he's putting her on and he never exactly corrects her assumption. But when she finds a gun in his glove compartment, she doesn't seem terribly surprised.

Meanwhile, Tucker and his partners - who have been dubbed the Over-the-Hill Gang in the media during their latest spree, which takes place in 1981 in Texas and several neighboring states - are being pursued by a lawman named John Hunt (Casey Affleck), who wants to catch Tucker, but also has some respect for him. There's a great scene in which the two characters meet at a restaurant. Hunt knows who Tucker is, but the robber isn't quite sure that Hunt knows, and it reminded me of a kinder, gentler version of the meet-up between Pacino and De Niro in "Heat."

While the film is set in an earlier era, it also feels as if it were made in one (namely, the 1970s), from the older-looking film stock, to its folky soundtrack and editing style. In tipping his hat to his leading man, Lowery's film has the vibe of a picture that might have been made in Redford's heyday. It's both an enjoyable low-key crime drama and a subtle romance as well as a touching tribute to one of cinema's most iconic figures from the past half-century.