Never Too Late
For movie lovers who have gone too long without another remake of Going in Style or a cheeky “last bender” flick like Last Vegas, Australia has a film for you. It’s a sort of comic twist on Da 5 Bloods, except these four Vietnam War veterans are all trapped in an Australian nursing home. Like the Spike Lee movie, however, they do have a young sidekick of Vietnamese heritage, a teenager named Elliott who’s the son of the facility’s humorless chief, known only as Lin.
The star here is American actor James Cromwell, playing Jack Bronson, who has managed to get himself admitted — and, apparently, involuntarily committed — to the nursing home in order to find his long-lost love, former Australian Army nurse Norma (Jacki Weaver). But Norma, who has early dementia, exchanges only a few words with Jack before she’s dragged away to a memory care facility that resembles a Four Seasons hotel. (Great insurance? Universal health care? Pure fantasy? We never know.)
That’s when the caper plot kicks in, as Jack rallies young Elliott and three aging residents — his former closest buddies in Vietnam, who just happen all to be in this same small facility — to try to break out.
To the credit of the three writers listed for this oddly conceived story, nothing goes as planned, at least until the finale. The humor is mild but amiable — low on body fluid jokes, high on morbid jokes — and the actors, especially Cromwell, are appealing and committed to keeping this shaky craft on course. (One of the veterans is a leisure sailor.) Further kudos are earned by not skimping on the dark side of aging, even if that leads to one bit with a stolen corpse.
It won’t pay for viewers to ask a lot of questions, like why these guys are locked up, or how Lin gets away with some of the abusive practices at her nursing home, or why there are no legal consequences for anyone — elders, administrator, or teenager. Director Mark Lamprell, who apparently specializes in high-concept Australian comedies, has no style to speak of, but at least he doesn’t over-sentimentalize the material. It’s all kind of sketchy, in both senses of the word, and Lamprell films the sketchiness with prime-time TV adequacy.
The movie has its virtues. It’s great to see Cromwell, who just turned 80, still spry and willing to be somewhat unsympathetic — Jack isn’t the nicest of men. There’s a running gag with a World War II veteran who’s frail as toothpicks but keeps threatening to beat up the four plotting “youngsters,” which is pretty funny just because it’s so deadpan and silly. And the last segment, when each of the veterans achieves some long-held goal, is genuinely satisfying. If such simple pleasures are enough, then Never Too Late could brighten your evening for 90 minutes or so.
Grade: C-plus. Rated TV-14 (the Australian equivalent of PG-13). Playing Aug. 21-23 at the Flat Rock Cinema restaurant.
(Photo: Blue Fox Entertainment)
