Christoph Waltz is just some Old Guy in undercooked assassin mess

With the help of Dolinski’s sultry manager, Anata (Lucy Liu), the pair travels from London to Ireland to complete a series of jobs in order to sharpen Wihlborg’s skills. Instead, they further showcase Dolinski’s own diminished abilities, which heightens the rivalry between the duo. Dolinski starts to question the true purpose of this training, and whether he wants to accept his forced retirement at all. The plot never becomes any more complicated, or more interesting, than this over Old Guy’s brief 93 minutes. The characters are two-dimensional, with bits of backstory—Wihlborg’s status as an abandoned foster child seeking connection; Dolinski’s standing as an elder being pushed into obscurity—shoehorned to add an emotional weight that is neither deserved nor earned. A romantic connection between Dolinski and Anata is the most unconvincing emotional beat in the film.

Hoffman, who was impressive as Dick Ebersol in Saturday Night, is little more than a snark machine here, whose default setting is “annoyed.” The extent to which he is constantly playing annoyed makes him annoying to watch. At least Dolinski’s reluctance to play nice makes sense as the old-timer digs in his heels. Filmmakers have consistently struggled to give Waltz suitable villain material in his post-Basterds career, as they’ve run off the fumes of Hans Landa for the past 16 years. While Waltz has performed in a handful of excellent titles—The French Dispatch, Alita: Battle Angel, Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio—he’s done just as many duds, and Old Guy is but one in a string of milquetoast, unchallenging performances in subpar films. 

But there aren’t just half-baked performances; the whole movie is underdone and fragmented. There is connecting tissue missing from every muscle and bone of the film, gaping holes in the narrative and editing genome. There’s no fluidity as Old Guy hops from point to point to get basic expository information across. The most egregious instance of this might be the hollow romance between Dolinski and Anata, which emerges out of nowhere and is founded on nothing. The opening sequence sets up a film that never emerges, and when it’s harkened back to in the middle and the end, when Dolinski goes out briefly to a club again, it is presented as if out of obligation: Dolinski needs a character trait and that character trait is “this guy likes to party sometimes, maybe.” Even the score is unremarkable and repetitive, like hold music while on line with the unemployment office.

Old Guy is as boilerplate as its title, which, on the surface, evokes a playful irony that is nowhere to be found in the final product. Maybe that irony was once intentional; maybe there is an action-comedy version of this film that exists somewhere, languishing on the cutting room floor, with humor outside of catty arguments and sarcastic throwaways. But Old Guy, as is, is just a film about an old guy, free of complexity or nuance, coasting towards its formulaic conclusion. The clubbing moments, with Dolinski going wild and crazy, feel like vestigial organs in this malformed movie.

Director: Simon West
Writer: Greg Johnson
Starring: Christoph Waltz, Lucy Liu, Cooper Hoffman
Release Date: February 21, 2025