Looking to fill a hole in his life, 70-year-old retired widower Ben Whittaker (Robert De Niro) decides to challenge himself by starting a new job as a senior intern for an online fashion site. Over the course of working there, Ben becomes popular with his fellow, mostly younger, co-workers, including his boss and the founder of the company, Jules Ostin (Anne Hathaway). Ben’s charm, wisdom, and sense of humor help him to quickly develop a special bond and growing friendship with Jules.
I would first like to say that I am not normally a fan of these types of films but I chose to see it being that I am a big Robert De Niro fan. The vanilla story isn’t anything too original here and you can probably predict how it’s going to go but I didn’t mind that too much. It also isn’t very plausible or realistic so you are forced to slightly suspend belief here. Despite all of that, the thing that kept me going were the performances of De Niro and Hathaway but more specifically De Niro. He is just oozing with charm and class here and still has great comedic timing here. He also had great chemistry with all of the other actors including Hathaway with whom he spends most of his scenes with. They play very well off of each other which makes their character’s relationship more believable and relatable. Hathaway was great too but I feel like her role could have been played by someone else and would have been just as good. As I mentioned before, the film does have some comedic moments that I enjoyed for the most part mostly revolving around De Niro being an older person working with mostly younger people. Since he is older, he doesn’t know much about young people things and they don’t know much about older people things either. Most of the comedy comes from his trying to understand all of these things and about how this predominantly younger world works. This is done through his interactions with his fellow co-workers including Jason (Adam Devine), Davis (Zack Pearlman), and Lewis (Jason Orley) and with Jules and her family including her husband Matt (Anders Holm) and her daughter Paige (JoJo Kushner). I thought these scenes were done well. I also thought the script was well done, more specifically the characters who I thought were very well written as they all seemed like real, relatable people. Going back to the story, what would have made this film better in my mind is if the story had a little more depth to it. I think it tried to do many things but did not succeed at all of them. Either it could have done less or explore the topics it tried to suggest more deeply. It tries to bring up topics such as generational gaps, women’s equality, the life of a widower, etc but just glosses over them. Even with that, I still enjoyed it and gets my recommendation solely on the performances of De Niro and Hathaway.
Score: 7/10
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The EIC of the coincidentally-named keithlovesmovies.com. A Canadian who prefers to get out of the cold and into the warmth of a movie theatre.
