Donald Glover – Memphis Flyer

It’s always hard to know when to quit. We as a society put all the emphasis on the skills it takes to be successful and climb the ladder in your chosen field, but understanding when you’ve reached the point of diminishing returns is equally important. You frequently see it in sports, from Jerry Rice limping through his 20th season to Michael Jordon’s stint with the Washington Wizards. Overstaying your welcome happens all the time in the arts, too, as was driven home to me recently when, seized by Halloween spirit, I suffered through Abbot and Costello Meet the Mummy. Oy.

The trick is to go out, if not at the top of your game, at least when your chops are still sharp. One guy who was able to do just that was Forrest Tucker. If they gave out Crime Academy Awards, Tucker would surely get a lifetime achievement trophy. Between his 15th birthday and his death in 2004 at age 83, Tucker robbed more than $4 million from banks. Of course, they do give a lifetime achievement award for crime: Life in prison. But that was no deterrent to Tucker, who claimed to have escaped from prison “18 times successfully and 12 times unsuccessfully.” San Quinten, Alcatraz, Folsom — name a famous clink and Tucker probably busted out of it. The final time he was arrested at age 79, he was four banks deep into a crime spree as the “Gentleman Bandit,” so I think it’s safe to say that Tucker “retired” while his game was still tight.

Robert Redford is a national treasure. His list of awards stemming from his film career is so long, it has its own independent Wikipedia page. In the late ’70s, Redford was the first chairman of the Sundance Film Festival, named after Redford’s character in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. When Time magazine recently put him on their list of the most powerful people in the world, they called him the father of independent film.

Robert Redford (above) rides one last time as Forrest Tucker in The Old Man & the Gun.

Since it was the role of an unrepentant bank robber that propelled Redford to superstardom, it’s fitting that the 82-year-old Redford decided to hang up his filmmaking spurs portraying Forrest Tucker. The Old Man & the Gun is based on a 2003 New Yorker article by writer David Grann detailing Tucker’s exploits. It’s written for the screen and directed by David Lowery, whose breakthrough film Ain’t Them Bodies Saints gained international attention at Sundance 2013.

Lowery, who had the unenviable task of directing someone who has both a Best Director and Best Picture Oscar, is at the top of his game. The Old Man & the Gun is about endings, but it is much more playful and hopeful than Lowery’s emotionally devastating A Ghost Story. Lowery brings on his regular collaborator Casey Affleck as John Hunt, Tucker’s police detective nemesis. Much of Redford’s portrayal of Tucker is defined by this relationship. Hunt regards Tucker as a criminal and a threat, but with grudging admiration for his tradecraft. Tucker, on the other hand, thinks of Hunt as a work colleague and something of a chum. There’s a sense that some of the robber’s more daring jobs are done just to impress the cops.

Tom Waits

The rest of the cast is uniformly incredible. I envision Redford, who has a producer credit, picking up the phone one morning to ask Sissy Spacek if she would like to be his love interest. Who in their right mind is going to say no to that? Lowery gives Spacek more room to maneuver than she’s had in years, so she and Redford absolutely crackle together in scene after scene. Rounding out Tucker’s Over the Hill Gang are, amazingly enough, Tom Waits and Danny Glover. Lowery gives Waits a meandering monologue about why he hates Christmas, and just lets the camera roll uninterrupted while the gravelly voiced singer casts his spell.

Redford, clearly having a ball, has that old, mischievous twinkle in his eye from The Sting. When he calms a nervous bank teller mid-robbery by saying “You’re doing great,” you’ll wish he would be there to encourage you when your life hits a tough spot. The spirit behind his effortless, inspired performance is best summed up when Tucker says to his lawyer, “I guess when you find something you love, you keep at it.”

In its century long history, Hollywood has produced a handful of characters that have become icons of American manhood. Nick Charles, The Thin Man, was a hard living, but elegant aristocrat. John Wayne’s Ringo Kid from Stagecoach was the archetypal cowboy: laconic, upright, uncomplicated. Rhett Butler was an irresistible scoundrel. Humphrey Bogart’s Rick Blaine was a heartbroken cynic finding his way back to virtue in Casablanca. James Dean’s teenage misfit Jim Stark was the Rebel Without A Cause. Peter Fonda rode a motorcycle named Captain America on an LSD fueled trip in search of his nation’s soul, while Chris Evan’s Captain America was thawed out of the arctic ice to remind us of the better angels of our nature. The 1990s brought us both Will Smith’s wisecracking fighter jock from Independence Day and Tyler Durden, Brad Pitt’s hallucinatory, revolutionary alter ego.

Alden Ehrenreich as Han Solo and Joonas Suotamo as Chewbacca

Then there’s Han Solo. When he first appeared in Star Wars, Harrison Ford was still a part time carpenter. Four years later, when he introduced Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark, Ford was the biggest movie star in the world, and would remain at or near the top of the heap well into the twenty first century. Befitting Lucas’ postmodern pastiche approach to space opera, Solo was a mixture of Rick Blaine’s fractured romanticism, a card playing smuggler like Rhett Butler, a quickdraw gunfighter like Wayne, and unrepentant ladies man like, well, all of them. His ostensible role was to provide a counterweight to Luke Skywalker’s boundless optimism, but he was the one all the boys wanted to be and, when he won the hand of Leia in The Empire Strikes Back, the one all the girls wanted to be with.

Han was the outsized focus of the franchise’s earliest spinoffs. In the 70s and 80s, Luke and Leia got one spinoff novel, Splinter of the Minds Eye. Han Solo and Chewbacca’s adventures filled three volumes, then, in the 2000s, three more. When Disney bought Lucasfilm and started cranking out Star Wars movies on the regular, it was inevitable that Han would take a starring role. It started out promising, when Lawrence Kasdan, the screenwriter for The Empire Strikes Back and Raiders of the Lost Ark put together a script, but Solo: A Star Wars Story turned into a textbook troubled production when the original directors, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, were fired after four months of shooting. Lucasfilm honcho Kathleen Kennedy hired Ron Howard to clean up the mess, who was met with howls of derision from the fans. Lord and Miller are comedy directors who, it was hoped, would take Star Wars in a new direction. Howard was a safe choice, a Hollywood veteran with a reputation for unremarkable competence.

Donald Glover as Lando Calrissian

And that’s exactly what Howard brought to Solo. Kasdan, writing with his son Jonathan, constructed a solid series of heists gone wrong, shootouts, and chase scenes. We first meet Han (Alden Ehrenreich) as a street urchin boosting speeders on Corellia. His latest score, a batch of coaxium, a volatile spaceship fuel, is valuable enough to get him and his girlfriend Qi’ra (Emilia Clarke) off planet. But the plan goes quickly wrong, and the pair are separated. Desperate to escape his organized crime pursuers, Solo joins the Imperial Navy, hoping to become a pilot. Three years later, our hero’s washed out of flight school and is fighting with the stormtrooper grunts in the trenches of the swamp planet Mimban when he discovers a crew led by Tobias (Woody Harrelson) in mid-heist, and deserts the army to join the pirate life.

Emilia Clarke as Qi’ra

The problem with Solo does not stem from its chaotic production history. It’s that the star never fills the role. Ehrenreich is upstaged by literally every member of the supporting cast. Clarke’s performance is assured and nuanced, better than most of her work on Game Of Thrones. Woody Harrelson steals every scene he’s in. Donald Glover’s turn as Lando Calrissian is absolute, caped perfection. Even Chewbacca, played by Joonas Suotamo under the tutelage of Peter Mayhew, is more magnetic than Ehrenreich.

To be fair, filling the shoes of Harrison Ford is an impossible task that would have defeated the vast majority of actors. Take it from someone who has to sit through a lot of true crap: this is not a bad movie, and far from a return to the bad old days of Attack Of The Clones. There’s plenty of swashbuckling and primo spaceship action, but also a fair amount of box-checking fan service. The sight of the crystal skull from the tomb of Xim the Despot and Lando’s offhand mention of the Starcave of ThonBoka make my sad little geek heart grow three sizes, but will mean nothing to the casual moviegoer. Howard’s pedestrian direction gets the job done while underlining the greatness of Rian Johnson’s work on The Last Jedi. The bottom line is, Solo is a fun two hours at the movies, while also being an all-too predictable disappointment.