Critics reviews

Mostly this is a career-capping showcase for Redford, who with subtlety and ease goes out in style after a great long run.

Lowery borrows that story’s framework for a movie that shares the fine-grained texture, gracefully flowing moods, and firmly rooted sense of place of his previous films and adds some bold new flourishes, for the most part, depend on Redford’s charismatic presence and that display it in a new light.

It may not be breaking any new ground, but it revisits old turf in a way that’s marvelously satisfying. It’s a homage both to the glamorous cops-and-robbers of a bygone age and to Redford himself.

It’s agreeably larky, especially Waits’s improvised “freeze sailor!” childhood reminiscence and the moment when Spacek’s wistfulness is meaningfully lit by the glow of a car’s receding taillight. Yet it all feels like a crock. Its attitude toward American individualism is unconnected to recognizable experience.

Redford is slyly brilliant, mischievous and melancholy at once. He appears to be enjoying his last hours on screen as much as Tucker evidently loved robbing banks and escaping from prison.

If that tableau of mystical, intergenerational storytelling finds Redford sliding seamlessly into Lowery’s world, The Old Man & the Gun exemplifies something a shade nearer to an actor-as-auteur endeavor, complete with a quick quotation from the Redford canon: Lowery enlivens one sequence with recycled footage of the young Redford fleeing the authorities in The Chase(1966).

The only way Lowery can disguise the sentimentality of this “adult” comedy-drama is by keeping it colloquial and low-key. He tosses in some moral ambiguity about Tucker’s collateral emotional damage, but not enough to complicate or deepen the message.

Chemistry counts for something, and actors Robert Redford and Sissy Spacek have it in spades in the trifling-at-best, galling-at-worst dramedy The Old Man & the Gun.

How much intensity and suspense can you drain from a movie about cops and robbers without having the thing collapse into anecdote and whimsy? “The Old Man & the Gun” kind of does just that, but it’s hard to mind too much.

Redford has a special grasp of crime comedy, one of the trickiest and most rewarding of genres, and he brings 50-plus years of work to one thoughtful scene after another.